Clothed in despondency he began to make his way slowly now along the pavement towards the bus stop hidden in a couple of trees at the end of the bridge. Then came the unearthly sound of bagpipes which made him forget himself, stop, listen. Did it rise from the old Dean village? Or did it ascend from far below in the Water of Leith? Or did it come from the city borne across the distance? The thread of music addressed him — thrilled him — immensely plaintive — conjuring up a fire music, a water music. And the fallen bishops, knights, kings, spades, hearts, heads, clubs were singing in space through Harp parallel elements….
The wind blew a straggling portrait of leaves towards him. A taxi was approaching.
“Taxi. Taxi.”
He was whirled over the bridge to the dying chorus of Harp’s unearthly bagpipes.
9
Goodrich had not been in contact with his visitors for some days after the narrow shave he had had on the Dean Bridge but descending from the rock garden in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens he came almost face to face with Jennifer. She did not appear to see him. Had she deliberately looked through him and ignored him as they passed each other, or was it a genuine distraction which possessed her and made her blind to him at that moment?
His invisibility was embarrassing. He wondered whether he had offended her that morning when she came into the sitting-room in her beauty pack. He had spoken tactlessly perhaps and left the room rather unceremoniously.
Weeks, months had passed — from late winter into summer — over which time he had taken Black Marsden, Jennifer and Knife into his house, FEED MY SHEEP, he thought wryly: the most potent assembly of god’s sheep he could recall — lives that seemed more real than any body of fictions or matching ruses to his inner book, inner diary. No wonder tempers flared every now and then.
Now this morning, for example, had Jennifer deliberately ignored him? On the other hand he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt in his mind — she had been preoccupied as they passed each other. Another thing, having been reduced to the state of a ghost by her, he was comprehensively aware of her — her figure, clothing, gait etc. Some purgatorial necessity perhaps.
It amused him in this context to draw a kind of cartoon of himself run over by the car on the Dean Bridge so that the idea of his ghostliness and invisibility could become comical and relieve him of embarrassment. Thus his comprehensive awareness of her became concretely intuitive and curiously supernatural. She seemed to glow this morning with father sun rather than mother earth whom he had seen plastered on her not so long ago in his sitting-room.
Now, when they came upon each other, she was walking hand in hand with a man he did not know. He had so confidently expected her to stop and introduce her companion that he was smiling even before she came abreast of him. Then as he passed he realized she may have been wholly absorbed by something the man was saying. It had been a shock when she cut him dead but the comical absurdity of being a ghost cushioned the shock into the humour of invisibility. And furthermore he was provided with a chance to look more closely at her companion who became an additional agent in the comprehensive portrait he had begun to paint of her.
This man wasn’t the pale young rider with whom he had seen her in the Royal Mile not very long ago. This was a somewhat older man, down-to-earth looking and wearing solid spectacles, a much more robust man all in all; the air, in fact, of a manual worker, an out-of-doors man. Robust as he was, however, he shared an unmistakable feature with the other man (the pale young rider).
It was a depressed feature. Robust as he was he lacked authority. Physical as he was, he seemed devitalized economically, beaten into shape by a kind of perennial regional hammer, the hammer of depression. Solid as he was he appeared depleted of both a will-to-power and a will-to-revolution.
He seemed as unsuitable for Jennifer as the pale young rider had been. Perhaps they were brothers in this feature or respect — one a curious eunuch of spirit (depleted of spiritual authority), the other a curious eunuch of politics (depleted of revolutionary authority).
This kinship between them made Goodrich conscious with renewed strangeness and sharpness of Marsden’s phenomenon of personality. In some subconscious degree beyond her apparent apprehension Jennifer was so subject to him — to his ironies and powers — that her men turned into substitutes of her unfulfilled longing for him….
As this resentment against Marsden grew and this tide of feeling — this passion for Jennifer swept through him — he was on the point of calling after her but it was too late: they had already turned a corner in the road. And he was left with a desolation, the hollow cue or strangeness of living lives, living other lives as well as one’s own. The desire mounted in him to strike Marsden; to set Jennifer free. It was an irrational dream, parasitic as well as violent, but it took his breath away as upon a rare self-deceiving plateau, tabula rasa assassin or murderer.
He began to walk across a stretch of grass towards a large cedar overlooking a stream or pond. There was a bench upon which he sat, and reflected upon the nature of invisibility. He opened his book and scanned the pages.
Was invisibility a bonfire whose sparks seared the memory until one party or face or eye of the world lay in shadow, did not see the other party and yet in unselfconscious disarray provided a comprehensive beckoning portrait link by subconscious link?
Was one half of the world’s invisibility an immanent sun of friendship within the globe — like Harp and Goodrich who when they met for the first time got on like a house on fire?
Was invisibility a ghost town, a ghost culture, a ghost landscape, an unmasking of schizophrenic premises?
Was invisibility the slate of birth or the slate of death, the mask of love or the mask of hate?
Moveable squares on a chessboard, thought Goodrich, aroused all at once by the spectre of infinity — by his own cartoon of ghostliness — to look far and deep into the spaces he had attempted to bridge in his journeys around the globe. First he needed to revisualize (and revise) his journey across Namless….
*
“What do you hope to find?” asked Knife, who drove him on a rickety road in a rickety taxi through blistering mountains towards the Town of Namless. This Knife was brown and more talkative than the others but he belonged to the same family as black Jamaican Knife and Marsden’s white purgatorial Knife.
“What are you looking for?” Brown Knife repeated.
“I was born here in Namless,” said Goodrich waving his hand at the ribbon of road which seemed to undulate here and there like a stylized path through a sea of land blown into long crests and troughs by subterranean storms. “I remained here until I was one year old when my father, an American engineer, died. My mother re-married in Scotland and we returned — she and my stepfather and I — when I was five years old. Square Five. Age Five.”
“Square Five? Age Five?” Knife was puzzled.
“Oh my stepfather disappeared in Brazil when I was five,” said Goodrich in laconic explanation. “My mother and I remained for a year or two at Namless trying to learn all we could. But it was impossible to get all the facts. There were all sorts of rumours. A rumour, for example, that he had deliberately dropped out.” He stopped and Knife gave a sharp nod. “We had to leave in the end,” Goodrich continued. “It was an unhappy time. Perhaps that is why I have come back. To try and sort out something, something oppressive.” He paused. “I was six or seven years old when we left. It’s a long time, a long time ago. And Namless looks like another country.”