The atmosphere began to change abruptly into a tide or bar of spacious houses possessed of an air of leisure and well-being.
They ascended St John’s Gardens and came upon St John’s Church on the summit of the hill from which spectators, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had had a grandstand view of the Hippodrome racecourse.
The choir was practising inside and the sound of blurred organ and voices came like orchestrated applause from a past day. Limbo horses swung to that spectral applause through Clarendon Road, across Ladbroke Grove and into Portobello Road’s sea of a market that dipped into all periods and accents, book bargains, antique voices, trade voices and rough cheer.
Each hoof deposited its climax of curious, half-glittering cargo or prizes. A cloud-horse drifted back towards Ladbroke Grove, stood over St John’s steeple and stepped into Eleanor’s bedroom and mirror….
The door to the apartment was slightly ajar. Leonard entered, stood on the thick carpet that led into the flat. He shut the door softly behind him. He knew Harlequin was away. But he was almost persuaded that a shot might ring out and he would fall by the side of the swimming pool he had passed or be trampled under a horse’s hoof.
One area seemed drawn into the other, giant racecourse into guarded hallway, one fortress of chance or death into another, until a sprinkle of fate seemed as swift as a bullet. Until sprinkle and bullet, phallus and perfumed temple in which Eleanor sat, were an intimate paradox and brushstroke between one fortress and another.
Francis stopped dead in Leonard’s fictional tracks in the hall of the apartment as da Silva unveiled another translation of the elements in his book. He was shocked anew to see the intimate thoughts of his body and mind painted into broad daylight, thoughts of Eleanor, of her absent “husband”, of the “fictional” Eleanor and the “real” Eleanor in bed, in his arms.
It was the strangest climax or notion by which he (a secretive writer) was possessed to import black Leonard into his book.
There, away on business in Liverpool, yet looming like the shadow of war over the flat — in da Silva’s translation of Francis’s book — stood the older jealous man with whom Eleanor lived and whose house this was.
There stood also, with a finger on the trigger, the young revengeful Harlequin, of Leonard’s age, obsessed by thoughts of nondescript parentage in the miscarried foetus of the gods. Until he believed himself the older man’s son conceived, all the same, by Francis (or Leonard in bed with Eleanor at the heart of the book of fictional yet terrifyingly real inner life).
And as Leonard waited for the young daemon of his own age to fire, on behalf of father time, he felt himself projected forwards into future wars and conflicts in which the “old” Harlequin had “unaged”, had shed half his years, in order to become Francis’s and Julia’s unborn son given fictional projection into cruel, half-incestuous, half-foreign, life. So that as the bullet sped, its material consequences seemed less overwhelming, almost as if it were tipped by ineffectuality to vanish into an apparition or creative paradox. Could Julia’s miscarriage of flesh-and-blood be converted into profound sensibility of apparitions of community (in resurrections of the unborn) one lives ahead of one’s time in order to be whole and to survive? Could a queen’s unborn son prove the trigger of fictional life, parable or strangest blessing or miscarriage of bullets by ageing/youthful jealous tides of populations? And it was as if a subtlety of shocking comprehension, that drove the creative imagination to run far deeper than moral convention or grave or cradle or appearance, led Francis into bed with another man’s wife in pursuit of a supreme fiction or book or treaty of sensibility between the born and the unborn; led him into a voyage of affections, that appeared promiscuous, but was other than promiscuity within a design of unfathomable premises of imaginative unity as compensation for losses endured; led him into a conception of the miracle of survival, immunity from fire, immunity from water, immunity from bullets, as limbo complications in the dancing strangers in his book….
As the threat of a gun — that mirrored the half-curse, the half-blessing, of unlived lives or dormant ages, lived lives or translated feuding ages — began to dissolve, Leonard moved forwards again along the hall until he came to Harlequin’s study or “holy of holies”.
He poked his head in, fascinated all over again by a tiny model of a machine gun and by larger-than-life “percussion transitional revolvers”, on a wall of the room, like emblems of menace that could blow one to smithereens. They had been rifled with six chambers and there was a “sighting hole” in the bar hammer; a unique short-lived weapon that stood between the “percussion pepperbox” and the “true” or “atomic” revolver.
The other half of another wall was lined with books in red leather binding, from the age of Homer to the age of Dante on to Dr Johnson, side by side with a startling display of weapons that ranged from models of variants of the sixteenth-century German wheellock through mid-seventeenth-century north Italian wheellock and late seventeenth-century Scottish all steel flintlock. (The Scottish models were particularly impressive with scroll or “ramshorn” butts.)
There were guns with Spanish miquelet locks that were crude and angular with their huge-jawed cocks and right-angled steel and pan covers. There was the prepossessing English dog lock of the middle seventeenth century in which the cock and tumbler or axle were forged in one piece.
There was an admirable French lock designed by one Marin le Bourgeois, a gunmaker, painter, sculptor, musician.
“The dance of the guns,” Leonard sighed, almost flippantly, but the sense of his miraculous survival in history, the sense of having escaped jealous retribution, folly, his own and that of others, from the madness of hate or feud or war — across middle passage ages, middle passage generations, centuries — had not entirely faded as he retreated from Harlequin’s “holy of holies” and made his way to Eleanor’s bedroom.
“A growing shock”, da Silva echoed the subtlest dispersal of gunfire, upon the ladder of fate on which he was painting scenes from Francis’s book as if each step or bar were a box in which times danced, “to see your characters unveiled before you within scenes that unravel a series of lusts and connections in you, their creator. In me as well upon the swings of conscience. Your daemon of conscience. Conscience indeed. What is the conscience of art in a promiscuous age, a vicarious age?” He was serious as he asked, yet laughing like an artist-clown, to veil his late twentieth-century naked discomfiture. Francis was laughing too from within the swings of the grave to the cradle to unveil his early-to-middle twentieth-century skeleton discomfiture—“What is community Da Silva? Ours is a promiscuous age, a vicarious age, indeed.” He confronted da Silva as one who spoke unspoken thoughts and hidden dreams from the canvas or silver screen of the dead to the very hand that painted it or him with flying strokes or phantom bullets.
“What is my greedy connection to Eleanor, yours to Julia and Jen? Are we not all greedy for immortality as we swing from the past into the present, the present into the future? I need Eleanor to return to Julia as vicarious queen. You need Julia to come to Jen as living lady-in-waiting with whom you play your games of divorce from death and re-marriage to life. We are immersed — as you make so plain in each brushstroke of hidden darkness or light — in the strangest intercourse of survival, those of us who suffer statistics of disaster, in each minute, and need to resense a bond of survival through ages.