Their bodies did not touch in essence, Mary knew, uncertain in what degree she was dreaming of herself or of frustrated Stella. Perhaps baby John had been conceived within the unconscious embrace of brother and sister (rather than husband and wife) and Stella’s discovery of her pregnancy just over three-and-a-half years ago was as startling as if a phantom cuckoo had deposited an egg in Mary’s (rather than Stella’s) body.
Mary dreamt that she lay in Sebastian’s mind dreaming of the foundations of paradise. A butterfly arose out of Dolphin Street kitchen and garden and its wings succeeded in drawing Mary and Stella together into the rhythm of a pulsating creature Sebastian sought to kiss and to kill at wishfulfilment stroke. He was astonished that wished-for fire under the dress of earth had drawn wives and sister-populations into a live butterfly which flew close to his eyes and mouth with the food of its wings. At first it seemed the soul of bread, the soul of possession, in a violent universe. He began to play a majestic lament to quintessential bride, quintessential property.
Mary woke abruptly. The vividness of her dream left her weak. She shivered almost imperceptibly; the butterfly in her blood warned of the curse that was soon to come. Another two days or three, perhaps four. The light of the ashy, winter morning seeped through the vaguely mud-coloured curtains. She was relieved to find Sebastian had not actually moved. He was a foot or two away from her, sound asleep, snoring at her side. Nothing to match the majestic lament of the flute he had played. Such were the anti-climactic foundations of paradise in Dolphin Street. Mary was relieved, then amused, but despite everything, despite nameless fears, despite sordid chorus, despite a deprived feeling at the pit of her stomach, there remained a sensation of the majesty of the flute that had entered her body — the body of time — since creation began. Sister and wife as catalyst for child and mother. In the grey light and ash of winter — inchoate, pre-menstrual genesis of the sun — life sought intercourse with death’s sleeping brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, in every stricken place around the globe that cohered nevertheless into endangered paradise.
She was relieved, and still amused; relieved to be here, to be alive, relieved she was still in bed with another man’s dreams however transient those dreams were in her own imagination like the dreams of god. What a bridge (or gulf) lay between god’s dreams and brother man’s. What an incorrigible snore! It sounded for all the world as if he were saying Sebastian is the founder of paradise: there was a hiss and a consonantal, equally hissing, ultimatum. Mary listened to the tail-end comedy of her cohabitation with him, with the majestic flute he had played. She was smiling openly as she brushed her hair from her eyes. How unkind it would be to wake him now, tell him she could not say whether he was her victim or she his — and ask him if he recalled the majestic lament he had played to her, the genius he had displayed for anti-climactic tragedy into the comedy of a butterfly as frail and sensitive in the texture of its wings as the hair over her eyes illumined by an iridescent rainbow of tears.
Father Marsden had said that if one could ascend a rainbow of tears one would converse with the souls of the living and the dead. It was on that rainbow-bridge that a butterfly of existence flew. On each wing were intricate and multiple records of the deeds of many lives shimmering and shifting to reflect anew each individual history or individual body. As such it was the spiritual chameleon of blood. It tended to fly upwards as well and to bring one into conversation with a “family tree” between heaven and earth. Curiously enough that “family tree” was not wholly unlike a body of television news transmitted by satellite branches in space around the globe, each satellite branch resembling a cocoon, a cylinder of bone drifting in air or reflected in glass.
The difference was — Mary felt as she lay in bed this morning — that “family tree news” came out of parallel universes to television cocoons, universes of unfurled wings on which had been inscribed events otherwise sunken into a sea of unconsciousness.
Mary’s mother had come from farming folk in the North. They had lived so close to the soil, embedded their fears and frustrations so deeply in the soil, that some of their descendants tended to run to the city as to a contrary plantation. Her father had been a postman. Or so she had thought at one period of her life before she discovered her real sailor-father’s letters. It was all recorded on a butterfly wing of bone along with the fact that her father’s mid-eighteenth-century antecedent had been black. A fact long submerged in a sea of space in which no one would have had the slightest inkling he was other than white.
That item of news, relating to black antecedents, was transmitted to her within two veiled lines of hair that fell over her eyes into pencilled butterfly wing. Marsden had been more prosaic. He had reminded her that she had browsed through his papers and books in the Angel Inn library, Hammersmith, where he lived, and had come upon another Angel Inn associated with one Crosby Hall that had been a private residence in London before being damaged by fire in 1673, when it was repaired and underwent a number of changes of personality, within the decade, to become a Presbyterian Meeting Hall, then a warehouse, then an auction room in which a sale was announced of “tapestry, a good chariot and a black girl about fifteen”.
There had, however, been some confusion in Mary’s mind, Father Marsden explained. Mary had confused the Crosby auction room sale with another advertised sale that had occurred a hundred years later, the details of which were explicitly declared in the Public Advertiser of 1769.
Those details rans as follows:
To be sold, a Black Girl, eleven years of age; extremely handy; works at her needle tolerably, and speaks English well. Enquire of Mr Marsden, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, in the Strand.
Marsden explained to Mary with a rueful smile that that “Black Girl” was her father’s true great-great-(or great-great-great-, he could not say) grandmother, news of whom had been transmitted to her by her dream-satellite in the womb of space.
Before arising from bed, Mary tried to decipher some other items inscribed in the “chameleon of blood” that flew on its rainbow-bridge of tears.
1661 For getting severall poore people out of ye Parish 8d 1679 Pd for clearing the Parish of a woman bigg with child 1/- 1682 Pd for clearing the Parish of two women bigg with child 4/- 1683 Given to James Edwards for clearing of the Parish of children and a greate Bellyed Black woman 2/- 1719 To gett rid of a poor Black woman with a bigg Belly 2/6 1727 Pd to severall Algiers slaves permitted to begg with a pass 3/6 1769 Cash paid at East India house for the discharge of Jackson a parishioner for having entered himself as a common soldier intending to leave his wife and child (Bigg with another) for the P’sh to maintain in his absence £4/4/11
Father Marsden could have confirmed the accuracy of “butterfly satellite” by referring to the parish accounts for St Swithin’s, London Stone, that were still kept by an ancient accountant he employed in his Angel Inn library. That ancient accountant was a character-mask Marsden employed in one of the occasional plays of earlier, forgotten times he staged in Angel Inn theatre.
Mary arose now from bed. Sebastian was sound asleep. Not snoring now. A dead log. She left the bedroom, had a quick shower, dressed, ate daintily and set out along Dolphin Street to Goldhawk Road.
It was a milder February morning than she had anticipated. The blanket she had relinquished on leaving bed seemed to pursue her still and to lie over the tree-less junction of Dolphin Street and Goldhawk Road, and upon the neo-Georgian early-to middle-twentieth-century houses in Dolphin Street that bore an unpretentious, if not down-at-heel, appearance in 1981.