Mary came to herself with Father Marsden’s beard falling towards her like grey-black moss in a dry riverbed to which she had been transported. She was in a daze and he helped her up from the floor and with an arm around her led her back into the study. “Oh my god,” she said. Her memory was blank.
He led her to the great armchair by his desk into which she slipped with the luxurious sensation of reclining in an upright bed or couch. “A little wine,” he said. She sipped the red wine, the shadow of memory was returning, she felt a trifle better. “Father, I’m sorry I collapsed like that but….”
“Not at all, my dear.”
“I remember now — it was the black man.”
“What … what …?” said Marsden sharply.
“I came upon him in the study. I thought he was lame. But he ran.”
“Ah!” said Marsden with a trace of relief in his voice. “Young Anancy. He’s on his way to … He’s back from … He should not have come into the study. But then, I know, it’s Utopia. You left it there yourself.”
The wine imbued her with a gentle fire but she still felt curiously at a loss and as if she had voyaged into another country.
“He was black, Father, and when he fooled me and ran like that I felt he’d been up to no good, that he was a thief, and then … it was as if…” She stopped. She felt ashamed of her double vision now, the running figure (greased lightning) in the street and also in the house, within corridor and bridge, so swift it vanished into locked interior rooms and spaces, locked bedrooms, locked memories, secret files.
Marsden gave her a gentle pat on the head. “Try and relax, Mary,” he said. “How are you feeling now?”
“Better,” she said. But her voice sounded shaky and uncertain. Marsden was watching her intently. His black greying beard fell to his chest and she remembered the sensation of moss falling from rock, the sensation of the many journeys, expeditions he had made of which she had read in his papers, expeditions into many corners of the globe. In her half-dazed, half-waking state, with the wine coursing in her veins, she was struck afresh by his high forehead close to her now, the faintest aroma of incense, she thought, perfumed sculpture of bone, priestly mask of flesh. The domed head sanctified the hidden eyes, almost hooded eyes, that receded into folds of skin and yet occasionally sparkled under the thickest eyebrows she knew with the light of phenomenal sympathy, kindness and understanding.
“A little more wine,” Marsden said gently. “Try and relax.”
She drank the wine and surrendered herself to the sensation that Marsden’s divine knob of a head accentuated his otherwise frail body and gave it a curious strength, the strength of a stick or a rod upon which to lean. As if something, some invisible presence, did lean upon him, did support itself through him, a spirit that towered invisibly above him and clasped him as if he were its knobbed walking stick with which to patrol the globe … It was an extraordinary half-drowsing, half-protected feeling that ran hand in hand with endangered self and she wondered in what degree the Anancy figure had helped to bring it into play and into being.
There was a distinction, yet resemblance, between Anancy and Marsden, between masked, black youth and masked, white age. At the heart of the cloud that still partially enveloped her, Anancy returned as sculptured chariot of god (with one wheel that ran round and round as if it were whole, yet served in envisioning a broken revolution to signify the moral fate of all human design). Father Marsden was quite different. His strength was the paradox of spiritual age. His body had been whittled or sliced by fate, it seemed, into a knobbed stick. The apparatus of daemonic possession that he may have endured or enjoyed as a young man had changed; he had been cut and penetrated over many decades into a living evolution or original species of spiritual art until his priest’s body had come to signify not so much “possessed apparatus” (possession by inventive angels and inventive devils) as consenting prop or support, consenting organ or stick, upon which a giant spirituality leaned and signified freedom from desire, freedom from the perversities of affection.
Mary longed to reach up to him, unprepossessing as he may have seemed to others who would have been dubious of his intentions, the hypnotic wine, the hypnotic net he cast far and wide. Ancient lover. Ancient annunciation. She would have yielded herself to him without a moment of misgiving; she would have laid bare her heart to knob or stick or bone upon which a towering spirit walked in space. Laid bare her breasts, her thighs, her body. Laid bare … What was she saying, thinking? Mary was dazzled by — and ashamed of — the many creatures she was, the distances that lay between herself and the consenting prop she had glimpsed. In her haste to reach out to it or to him, to seize his consenting organ of spirituality and hard-won art of freedom, she was suddenly unsure who or what he was, who or what she was. No wonder he seemed unprepossessing to others, priest, ex-priest, lover, seducer.
The distance between “possession” and “freedom” was infinitely great. It had no alternative but to make one faint, make one collapse, run, crawl, diminish itself, yet multiply itself into deceptive wheels, into Anancy chariot, unselfconscious tricks of guilt, black romance, difficult seed of encounter between ancient stick of a master and naïve mistress of god.
“Shall I get you a taxi, Mary?” Marsden broke in. She sensed a sudden weariness in his voice.
“I’m fine now,” Mary protested. “I haven’t yet typed the paper you asked me to do Wednesday.”
“No rush,” said Marsden. She had been faint before, he now was. Where lay the truth, where the fiction of towering strength?
“I want you to rest over the weekend, my dear. And if you’re down with the curse on Monday, I’ll see you on Wednesday or Friday. Now I’ll phone for a taxi.”
Mary arose from the chair. “I’d prefer to walk, Father,” she said. “It’s a mild day. I feel like walking. I’m sorry….”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Marsden. But she sensed his displeasure. It was so subtle, she could not be sure what she may have said to offend him. He led her to the door and waved after her. Ancient lover. Had she said that? Ancient annunciation of humanity. Had she actually said something like that? Had she held on to him? Had she sought to climb into paradise with him? Unprepossessing, prepossessing summit of freedom, ascent to which is littered by creatures of desire that pop up and speak …
Mary was sorry to go, glad to go. That alone, so to speak, was the measure of two selves.
Marsden was displeased, she felt, yet as he waved after her he was pleased — she sensed it in the way his body was poised, the mysterious alchemy of hidden summons within overt gesture of farewell, hidden pleasure within displeasure — pleased that though she went she would come again as another self or with another self. His apparent void (was it pleasure or displeasure?) endorsed, if anything, a curious blank cheque or invitation to draw upon a bank of fictional “memories” and “non-memories”, “absences” and “presences”, with which to cast her fluid line (in paradoxical kinship to his stick) towards a psychic vitality of encounter that was needed if she were to create various stages, various approximations, to consenting prop she had glimpsed through him. That those approximations — line and prop — could lead her into the strangest veils and territories, into endangered premises and waters of emotion, went without saying. But there was no alternative to that long line, harlequin bait, if she were to salvage what was deepest and truest in herself. Each transfusion of blood from line to stick, as it were, from endangered blood to endangered bloodlessness was the paradoxical resource of divine pleasure and it was fraught with the danger of unconscious, unwitting intercourse and yet therapeutic mystery in brides of god.