Eleanor was playing the part of Harriet in the glare of television suns. It was an important film that would be transmitted by satellite to America. There was a green summer dress on her breasts like paint and yet it may have been an illusion for as Julia shaded her eyes the floating body of the actress in the water seemed curdled into winter foam and furs.
Julia stepped back herself from her lady-in-waiting who had flown from a Wild West studio in Italy (as if it were a bench in the park) to the Serpentine; turned away and stepped back herself into deeper recesses of the night-headed duck that sat on Leonard’s head, stepped through shell upon shell of pigmented camera to sail in another time from limbo port to limbo port of romantic oblivion.
The noises of twentieth-century London were momentarily stilled as the cameras clicked to paint each ghost. A fleet of children’s twentieth-century toy ships and dive bombers sailed on the Serpentine, flew in the air, not far from the film makers, under a gay summer sky. They seemed, all at once, a futuristic negative or painting, slightly unreal, slightly mad, like Picasso’s fashionable Guernica in the backward sky of nineteenth-century horse shining overhead.
She could still discern the magnificent rider embodying Physical Energy in the near distance of the park. Some said it had arrived in Kensington Gardens from as far afield as Cape Town — that it had broken loose from a Cecil Rhodes memorial and been caught by the hand of a sculptor called Watts.
Julia was peculiarly aware of all these co-existent features, implicit Guernica in Southern Africa’s cavalry, the smooth barrel of Watt’s horse in the cannonball bed of Picasso, and she gripped Francis’s arm with a profound sense of mourning in this timeless day of judgement/resurrection feuds, Promethean dawn and Serpentine fiery ghost.
“The present is an unreal letter one writes and conceals … out of a kind of cowardice perhaps.” She gripped Francis’s arm again as if she clung to a line that had been written for her or written by her a long time ago. “And then the letter returns before one loses one’s chance to see how close we are to the truth. Each lady-in-waiting’s alive the moment one sees, has the courage to see an entire body of approximate destinies in the womb of death and life.”
“Jen’s pregnant and alive, thank God,” said da Silva.
“What’s that? Whose voice was that? Was it you, Francis? Or did it come from the crowd over there? No. Not you. Nor anyone over there. His, the one who reads and edits my letters, your book, puts lines into my mouth, kisses my mouth with his brush. The future’s unreal until it becomes so real it actually speaks, in a play, in a poem perhaps, in a painting, in a novel. Each day in our lives was a resurrection Francis. And therefore we live backwards into the future until, who knows, the present may become so real we may live forwards into the past. We may live on either side of the grave. I wonder — did he say all of that or did I? I heard him cry ‘Jen’s pregnant and alive’ and I felt suddenly alone and yet on the edge of a sea that could take me to him; to you Francis when you plunge into some other world and leave me on this side of things.”
Francis held her and steadied her within the canvas da Silva painted. All of a sudden he was filled with irrational jealousy. “Who does he think he is?” he cried, “this other, this editor, this painter? In the first place it’s quite ridiculous really, I never read your letters nor you my book. We wrote and concealed …”
“Out of a kind of cowardice perhaps,” she insisted gently.
“It was nothing of the kind.”
“It was Francis. And now he brings us face to face, he edits our secret conversations.”
“You mean he brings you face to face with him. The arrogant bastard. Who does he think he is?”
“Francis. Not arrogance. We’re quarrelling again. His hand is there yes. In his interpretation of our lives. But can’t you see it works to diminish a pattern of domination?”
“What are you driving at Julia?”
“He makes us speak to each other so unpredictably, so unexpectedly, that we become the voices we feared or concealed in ourselves most of all in our past lives. He too becomes …”
“We become strangers to each other Julia. That’s his doing.”
“You mean we become more aware of the strangers in each other that we fear Francis. Unity is the mystery of otherness. I and Thou. I actually wrote that in a letter to you which you never read.”
“Whose fault was that?”
“Mine of course. I was afraid. As Eleanor’s afraid of your son in the parts she plays. She conceals herself from Harlequin as I concealed myself from you. It’s an immemorial drama. A mirror, a television box, a bed, a stream, a cradle, the tomb one invents. Many a great actress is born out of the stealth with which she conceals herself in others and from others. Who is your son Francis? Is he the descendant of all your terrors and hopes mixed together? Is he a creature of mixed blood? (I mean ‘blood’ in a painter’s or writer’s limbo sense, the sense of tradition that bleeds until it glows like a sun in one’s side.) To what and whom in you is he closest? Does he exist at all? Do you exist at all? You conceived him in another man’s wedding bed the day I lay in my coffin. Was it guilt for your own actions, your past affairs with women, or was it a form of blind jealousy that I might take it into my head in the grave — yes the grave — to have a lover who would come between us until we had no alternative but to face the resurrection of the self in a variety of strangers who play us as we play them?”
“Stop,” Francis cried. “Stop.” He felt chained within a theatre of unique contrasts, wedding day/resurrection day renascence of the arts; chained within a necessity to sift the evolution of the family of man from tabula rasa seed to tabula rasa conception; to sift tenderness/non-tenderness, conquest/savagery, being/non-being, all buried in inimitable constellations of otherness. “I must speak with him, this lover of yours. I cannot believe …”
“But you do believe, you do believe in god….” Julia sounded naïve.
Francis was terribly angry; angry at a precipitate logic of confrontation between Julia and himself he had concealed, or appropriated within his book of life, until this instant when they found themselves actually quarrelling — as if it were a dream and the conversations they held were theirs and yet not theirs — about the authority of love, the authority of god, the annunciation, the incarnation. Actually quarrelling (in the logic of dreams) in spite of — or because of — an unresolved ancient carnival feud of the parentage of the cosmos planted in their common flesh-and-blood.
“How can you think of yourself, your need for a child in the very grave and god in the same breath? It’s a heresy,” he wanted to shout but remained silent altogether aware of the authority he had himself arrogated to himself in this very matter. “He’s a devil, this artist-lover of yours,” he thought. “A devil,” he repeated softly, so softly, Julia scarcely heard; and then his voice softened and he continued unexpectedly, unpredictably, as if it were a confession—“We have a long, long way to go Julia if we are … you and I … to be, to live, to bridge our extremities. The collateral of conception deepens tragically in the world around us until children are bought and sold, as if they’d never been born, and security’s a model of intransigence. We need to plumb our intransigence in the depths and the heights. I put it into my book to you a long time ago Julia. (What is time? What is the incarnation?) Then hid it from you for your own good, your own good Julia, your own good. I swear. But now the tyranny of love I upheld for our mutual self-interest draws us back to lapsed seasons and lapsed senses, into gaps and holes through which to ascend, to descend into a daemon or creator, a daemon of conscience I fear.”