Mary arrived at the gate, made her way to the door along the flagged path through the garden covered with a sprinkle of blossom, minute snowdrops. She was surprised to find the door ajar and wondered if Marsden was in. She entered and made her way along the thickly carpeted corridor towards the great study on her left. It was an enormous house that seemed to echo with whispers, and the corridor itself ran far past the study into deep interior rooms that Marsden kept locked. The door of the study like the front door was ajar. She entered (it too was red-carpeted and whisperingly silent) and made her way across to a window overlooking the garden that came around from the front to the side of the house.
She deposited her bag on the table by the window and had begun to unbutton her coat when a sound caused her to spin around towards a great desk diagonally across from her in the huge, high-domed study. The book cases lining the wall became a swift blur as her eyes focused on a black youth (he could have been eighteen or nineteen years old) who had been seated at Marsden’s desk but had now sprung to his feet. For a moment she was paralysed with fright and convinced he would attack her. They were alone in the house. The city receded even more than it had already done the moment she came through the door. She felt with intolerable vividness the loud ticking of the great, gloomy clock high on the wall over Marsden’s desk, as if each sound came glimmering through its shadow-strewn face where the light streaked the glass over the Roman numerals, the long hand and the short.
The young man’s body and head stood just below and in line with the clock on the wall that seemed now a clown’s moon, however menacing, plucked from her own body to adorn external cave or womb or study. There had been stories in the local papers of women who had been attacked and robbed in the middle of the day. Thirteen minutes to eleven. Millions were being born, millions were dying. Mary read the time exactly through the shadowy multitude in the clock. She also “read”, at the heart of the clowning moon, it seemed, above the young man’s head, that he (like every thief of time) was lame. He had moved, limped a little, and she saw that his left ankle was bandaged. He belonged to the endless millions of the dying, of the newly born, all ages, all foetal humanity. The carpet between them had turned to charmed blood, her frozen blood mingling with his, his with hers like glass.
He was dressed in soft, leather shoes, the bandage on his naked foot, tennis shorts (such as a jogger might wear for a brisk trot around the block), and a thick sweater of greyish-blue. His face quivered slightly, the bones clear and sharp (so much so she wondered if he was much older than she first thought he was), giving extra tension to a tuft of beard on his chin. Her fears began to revive. The material and immaterial presence of millions enfolding them became scales of twin-memory, flesh of memory, and made her feel suddenly black and naked herself. And yet his eyes, she was convinced, were as frightened as hers in the moon of time, so frightened they saw through her blackness to her white breasts and her white belly and thighs.
Fright and fear bred violence (Marsden seemed to be saying to her as she confronted the black man in the room who seemed older and yet younger than she could gauge in her confused state of mind). For that very reason (Marsden implied) there was a compulsion or infectious Cupid’s arrow in her — and in him — that ran deep as love, true love, perverse love. It was obscure, that compulsion and arrow, but it related to the target of unfinished being, to a summons she had issued to him. She had summoned him or he her, though when or where that summons, that call, had gone forth was buried in layers of desire, the desire for pigmented luxuries, necessities, commodities of harsh and sweet emotion, daemonic possessions through which to extend one’s reach and grasp, one’s body, one’s brain and muscle. That was the key to every white or black, schizophrenic Cupid who had afflicted her in afflicting him, that was the perverse adolescence of civilization, perverse comedy, key or arrow of greed or dragon’s rape or love that encircled the globe.
Love! What was love save the key to lock or unlock fear? To love was to fear the keys of god and man alike, angel and trickster alike, thief and saint alike, child and monster alike. To love was to fear the keys of the kingdom. And once again she wanted to seize the window and SHOUT … scream for help from any and every passer-by. He may have divined her thoughts, he may have read her hysteric endorsement of the ambivalences of love and fear through which we judge others and are judged by others. “I’m not a thief,” he cried, “so please don’t make a scene. I haven’t a thing, not a weapon. Look! Nothing.” He spread his arms wide. “Father Marsden knows I’m here, though,” he confessed. “I was forbidden this room … but I saw….” He turned his eyes to the desk. “The door was open and I saw the funny title of that book.” He pointed to the desk.
“Sir Thomas More’s Utopia,” said Mary, smiling against her fear and finding her tongue at last. “I put it there myself this week.” His eyes were upon hers now. “I put it …” she began again, then stopped. “I brought you here,” she thought silently. “Utopia was the baitI used.”The thought came of its own volition. It seemed irrational, yet true. There was a ticking silence between them, a deeper pull than she could gauge, a deeper call than she knew, that had sounded long, long ago, even before the time when her father’s great-great-grandmother had been hooked by an Englishman to bear him children of mixed blood. Their names, in an eighteenth-century accountant’s ledger, were Chanty, Ambition and Desire. What names with which to saddle a child, names that called to mind Makepeace, Patience and Grace. Nowadays horses were heir to that tradition of names — Cupid’s Bow, Black Romance, Vanity Fair. How inimitable was the wishfulfilment cradle and stable of the human race, how inimitably vulnerable one was, how prone to nurse spectres in every webbed moment or vanity fair of blacks and whites within which one was entangled. Black Anancy (Marsden had told her) meant god’s chariot, god’s tapestry and trickster-spider, god’s bandaged, miniature ankle or wheel. How inimitably entangled one was in all fearful nets and creatures one had been purchasing and selling from time immemorial, immemorial object, immemorial flesh-and-blood.
Anancy suddenly hobbled to the door on his bandaged foot. There was something almost deliberate, almost masochistic, in the way he seemed to stand on the injured limb as if it gave him pleasure. Mary remained at the window, riveted there still by fear (or was it by obscurest affection?). Whose need was greater, she wondered, hers or his? All at once he appeared in the street. He waved at her. Her white face through the glass must have looked like a ghost’s! Then suddenly he shot away like greased lightning. Incredible! Her heart almost stopped. She could scarcely believe her eyes. Had it all been a trick, the bandaged ankle, the infirm gait? Was he a practised thief after all who deceived everyone with a twisted foot? She rushed forward without thinking into the corridor of the house, wondering if anything outside had been snatched, a vase, a mask or painting, anything, and in her bewilderment and rage — as she gained the beautifully furnished entrance hall — the sensation enveloped her that he was still here, still in the house, running for all he was worth not outside in the street but inside in the corridor upon the bridge of Angel Inn between worlds past, present and future. She saw him coming out of a future that resembled the past (the significant minority of blacks that had once lived in Europe) and she collapsed in a dead faint.