His anger flared up again as if he wished now to repudiate the confession he had made. But he put his foot nevertheless tentatively on to a rung in the ladder of fate da Silva drew from his book.
It was as if — on the arm of Julia — he had arrived at a crucial parting of the ways. He stood on an ancient pier over unknown serpentine waters magnified into the trunk of a tree that had fallen across worlds. Beside these waters a jealous mechanic of day, in the hand of a child, rocked or swung a ship of sun, a jealous mechanic of night, in the Bayswater hand of a child, rocked or swung a ship of stars. It was a game that extended through immemorial approximations to the genesis of day and night in the games that children played, that adults played.
His hand reached up too to Julia’s in the game of death and life Jen and da Silva played in the rocking canvas of the womb.
She had retreated out of curious reserve, inhibition perhaps or shyness. Like a child in a woman after a disagreement or a quarrel. She sat up in her coffin or swing as if it were a boat or a chair from which to address the jealous mechanics of the sun and the stars built into her husband’s book. Were they both daemon and creator, or was one god, the other devil? Her ladies-in-waiting swung into many achieved distances on branches of air and water that reached into every apartment of existence.
He wanted to seize her, to embrace her like a living coronation or sculpture, but he knew a trial run of the “limbo swings of the body” had commenced, precipitate seas, precipitate lands and elements, and that he needed to descend into these if he were both to follow and return to her, to embrace her and to be with her in truth and in deed, to embark with her in the fullness of expedition as with a mature queen of sorrows and joys shared by all lives and unlived lives suspended between heaven and earth.
5. Resurrection Day/Limbo
The origins of the family of man lay upon swings of time as Francis descended the ladder of fate.
Eleanor descended with him until she came to rest upon a stool before a mirror in her sumptuous apartment.
She sat in her bedroom in a rich corner of the universe in Ladbroke Grove. It was a free afternoon following a week of rehearsals in Kensington Gardens.
Harlequin was away on business in Liverpool and she was awaiting the arrival of Leonard.
Designs and models of guns were pinned into every wall of the house and her bedroom, with its wallpaper of an aggressive milky way, was no exception.
Her hair fell and half-veiled the stars or nipples that rested like red-brown pebbles in precipitate breasts of clay and gold.
A cavalry charge of cloud stood almost at slow motion in the mirror before her which was angled to catch the sky outside.
Da Silva felt a trace of gratification mixed with remorse in beginning to disclose to Francis an intimate translation of elements from his own book.
Sometimes it loosened the tongue — created a state of shock in an author — to see his secret thoughts and writings in public or painted flesh-and-blood (like a savage tribe exposed to itself), in the cinema, or the box, or the bed, or in a grave of water, in a coffin of sky; a shock to come abreast of oneself as cannibaliser of other lives and deaths around the globe, raider of others’ private lives, famous explorer, the base curiosity, the eternity of lust … and yet (in spite of it all) the potentiality for compassion….
“I know”, said da Silva almost apologetically, “what a shock it is to see your own incorrigible dreams and shadows re-appear before you, the seed of a dance between heaven and earth, flight to other places, conflict, pursuit. Take Eleanor. Take Harlequin. Take Leonard. From what high branch in the stars, in the tree of the sun, have you plucked them in compensation for your own losses?”
“I met Eleanor”, Francis suddenly confessed with a loosened tongue in his skull, “a month or so after my wife Julia had had a miscarriage, her first miscarriage. Met her, and the man with whom she lived, at an exhibition of guns. He possessed a shop in Holland Road but their home was in Ladbroke Grove. In the end she agreed to marry him. He was twice her age, you see, twice my age and Julia’s. That was years afterwards and, as you know, by a twist of fate they got married on the day of Julia’s funeral.
“Eleanor was a comfort to me, I suppose, when I first began to sleep with her, it was her coarseness. Something earthy and yet pathetic. She needed a strong man, a strong husband, and that Harlequin was not in spite of his collection of guns. They both vaguely knew of my wife Julia whom I kept religiously apart from them. She and they never met. Indeed I am sure they did not know that Julia was buried within the hour and minute they were married. That shows how successful I was in disclosing virtually nothing to them of Julia’s concrete suffering existence.
“So you see there was a real Eleanor and there was a real Harlequin behind the scenes in my book. Julia never said it but I knew she blamed me for the miscarriage. Irrational yes, I know. Perhaps it was post-foetal (rather than post-natal) depression. Her need or desire for a child was quite enormous, quite frightening. And yet she was kind, beautiful, considerate. Beside her Eleanor was clay. I used to go occasionally to Eleanor’s amateur plays. She loved acting. In my book she turns into a full-blown professional actress who makes her bed in pastures green and under the glare of satellites which tumble her in and out of global rooms and beds.
“And thus emerged quite naturally, or supernaturally, in my book, the goddess fiction of Eleanor, overshadowing millions, based on the ‘real’ Eleanor.
“Perhaps it was more of a curse than a blessing to project her into the future as if she could never age, never grow up, in remaining all her life a sleeping (however apparently active) princess of clay and gold.
“And I wed her to my son by Julia, the son that had miscarried, the son that became a real fiction. Julia’s child. My child. Everyman’s, everywoman’s, lost child.
“I called him Harlequin after the ageing husband of the ‘real’ Eleanor. I fashioned him as slender and young, half the age of the ageing Harlequin, half the size of the burly thunderous ironmonger.
“It was a recurring dream of unageing lightning youth in which Harlequin appears and re-appears and remains perpetually the same age as Julia when we lost our first child. No wonder he is a fallible legacy. Perhaps he knew (fiction though he was) how scarred he was as unageing god born of metaphysical womb. And it imbued him with a twinkle of humour at the height of his failed battles. He certainly saw he was no match for the sleeping (however apparently active) Eleanor.
“Indeed his presence, in my book, was a medium through which to clothe a faculty of perpetual unconsciousness, Julia’s unborn child, my unborn child, everyman’s, everywoman’s, unborn child; to create thereby the strangest sublimity of feud; to create through a mythical hero a mythical sleeping princess as well over which millions fight, a modern Helen caught between Paris, Achilles and Hector; caught, as it were, to forestall catastrophe — to transform, digest, catastrophe — through profound avant-garde creativity that gathers up what is insubstantial and rejected in the cradles of Man.
“So failed warrior that he is he is utterly real in the antagonists with whom he fought (still fights), the uncanny way he puts flesh-and-blood on the most unpromising skeletons, guns, bottles, houses, shattered monuments, fallen trees, broken fires, drought-ridden waters. They are all his antagonists drawn up into sublimity of feud from a pool of unconsciousness from immemorial miscarriages and myths.