Mary gave subtle rein to the impulse of black and harlequin humour that ran always with her upon, yet still below, the threshold of words. This was her chariot of resistance to depression, a chariot to air-tarnished bodies, rotten ghosts, a fluid tapestry of wheels, vaguely polluted, yet half-radiant, winter sun.
Cleanliness runs next to devil-may-care cosmopolis, she thought; pollution’s the wheeling palette of spirit of place. She wished she possessed the brush (the ironies) of spirit of place. Wishes (the chariot of place said to her) were painted horses on butterfly wings and their consequences — as she knew in her dreams of auction block rooms — were disturbing and strange. They brought one face to face with characters that had been dipped into every conceivable dye. Two “punk” characters were approaching her now and their scarlet-tinted hair seemed to levitate above the pavement.
She stopped at the first chemist she came to in Goldhawk Road and bought another packet of sanitary towels. The metaphysical wishes of the body — the chemistry of bandaged souls — invoked many a fashion, bizarre costumes, wholly unconscious of the sources (the curses and the blessings) from which they had sprung.
A mirror in the chemist’s shop gave her a glancing appreciation of herself. She was elegantly, perhaps slightly tartily dressed, red-gold hair, a shade too much eye-shadow, a stylish winter coat the colour of flamingo, beautiful legs (spirit of place said), good features (Marsden said), gloves that hid her groomed nails and sensuously veined flesh that came to light as she shed a glove and extracted a pound note or two from her purse. She put the article she had purchased into a neat, leather bag and restored the glove to her hand.
How unreal, yet real, one was when one saw oneself with one’s own eyes from angles in a mirror so curiously unfamiliar that one’s eyes became a stranger’s eyes. As at the hairdresser when she invites one to inspect the back of one’s head.
Next door to the chemist, the spirit of place had lavished sky-blue, artificial paint on a studio for processing film and auditioning “starlets” to play nude scenes upon magazine covers.
The studio ran up vertically for two storeys above the pavement and then it ran the entire block to the corner, occupying however — in horizontal extension of itself — only the upper storey above other business premises at pavement level. The distinction between the two remained the rather garish blue that divided the “stars” above from the mundane pigmentation of IRONMONGERS ICES CONFECTIONERS and LUSTRACURL. LUSTRACURL was the unexpected card in the pack belonging to the comedy of spirit of place; it depicted not scarlet but ink-black hair as if to add a note of carnival West Indian paint, carnival lustracurl blood, to Marsden’s book of consumer riddles and origins of human attire or dress.
On her way to Shepherd’s Bush market Mary passed Greek, Chinese and Indian restaurants vaguely coated with the misty conglomerate of space, their menus like price tags upon antique windows and upon chamber pots filled with exotic plants.
Marsden’s eighteenth-century accountant was often seen prowling in the neighbourhood licking his chops at the fortune he could have made had it been possible to transport backwards in time the curiosities of twentieth-century London into his Crosby auction rooms. Footballs rubbed balloon noses with space invaders, pop records looked blandly across counters at AD 4000 conflict games, prams kissed lampshades and jeans.
Mary assembled a list of prints of masterpieces and posters of actors and revolutionaries the eighteenth-century Marsden accountant acquired in late twentieth-century Shepherd’s Bush market and in Goldhawk Road. The list was as follows:
For getting poore Van Gogh’s yellow chaire out of ye Market 25p For getting one unsigned Cubist Bigge Bellyed Woman out of ye Market 50p For getting Lowry’s thin-Bellyed Populace out of ye Market 100p For getting Picasso’s Blue Period (coffee-stained) out of ye Market 25p For getting Starsky and Hutch (bullet-stained) out of ye Market 25p For getting oil-rich Nigerian Benim Queen out of ye Market 100p For getting ye pointillist Seurat Bathers out of ye Market 25p For getting Dracula and Frankenstein out of ye Market 50p For getting Che Guevara and Catholic Nunne out of ye Market 25P
And that was but a sample of the refugee oddities Mary ticked on the accountant’s pad. He was a rather quaint old gentleman, she thought, until one looked deeply into his veiled eyes scarred by the wishfulfilment tragedies and comedies of the marketplace. He breathed an air of refinement and stoical mask of the world’s cruel fair and its enslaved commodities called “arts”, “revolutions”, “entertainments”. Was art, was revolution, was entertainment, but a veil over the humours of the human/animal body? Had nothing changed since archaic woman menstruated, became pregnant and gave birth to a masterpiece, a daemon baby, a daemon Heracles possessed by serpents which he strangled in his cradle?
What was the human distinction between p (for a twentieth-century entertainment poster) and imperial shilling (with which to expel “greate Bellyed” mother and yet to purchase endangered child and trickster of cradles)?
All of which reminded her that it was time to ascend the bridge of space by catching a bus and flying to Marsden’s Angel Inn in Hammersmith.
She had become acquainted with Father Marsden in the winter of 1976 when she answered an advertisement in an evening paper calling for a secretary/research student to work with him on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A knowledge of English literature — it was stated — would prove an asset. She continued working for several months after she became pregnant in June 1977 and then returned when John was six months old. Marsden kept in touch with her all the time. He was much more than an employer, he was her witch-doctor, her priest, her newfound master. His house became a bridge into other worlds and an elaborate cave of the womb over which she was invited to preside and to bleed her hopes and despairs through hypnoses of creativity within which he seemed to bind her and liberate her. She spied multiple humours of body and bandaged soul. In that cave of Angel Inn The Tempest raged close to Wuthering Heights, The Ancient Mariner stood with Ulysses, Pygmalion seduced Darwin on the Voyage of HMSBeagle Round the World. Mary changed HMS Beagle to Beatle Submarine.
Thus Mary’s arrival was as much a historic event as if she were herself another book of fictions in conversation with those he kept on his shelves, in his drawers and numerous cabinets, numerous living masks in the volume of riddles of spiritual blood he was compiling. Transfusion was part of his original (rather than revolutionary) art. It created a subtle, therapeutic no-man’s land or accent upon cross-cultural humanspace between “possession” and “possessed”. She knew of (but had not met) the “no-man’s land writer” he had employed to assemble his notes and the characters she herself was creating — in conjunction with his masks — into a book of “fictional lives”. “What is he like?” she had once asked but had received a dusty answer worthy of his accountant except that his eyes seemed to vanish yet sparkle with benign humour, benign principle that sometimes one needed to “divide and rule”.
Today was Friday — it was Father Marsden’s morning for shopping — so she knew she would arrive at the Inn before he got back. (On occasion — upon Fridays — as she had implicitly confessed, she had stumbled upon Marsden or his extraordinary accountant in Goldhawk Road or Shepherd’s Bush market.)
Angel Inn existed in a quiet, residential backwater off the busy Hammersmith area, not far from the old St Paul’s schoolground. There were lime and horsechestnut trees in Marsden’s street all bare and singularly beautiful now as living sculptures of winter. Spirit of place possessed not only the ribald artifice of Goldhawk Road but unselfconscious naked integrity of winter lime or catalyst of seed preceding spring. Cross-cultural winter and spring.