“I am smitten by the stars as I lie here, their seed on my lips.” She sipped the water again and his painter’s brush smoothed her lips.
“Is it wrong,” she demanded, “to conjure up a lightning body of reflections re-made by forces, a lightning desert or a lightning garden? Is it a violent universe we inhabit (or impose upon ourselves) as conquest by deity? Is it a savage formula entangled in the origins of human culture, I meanconquest, to which we unwittingly subscribe in all our elaborate projects of soul conscripted by structure? Doubtless it is — who would deny it—” she stopped again, then continued softly as if a chorus of voices dwelt in her throat, “a violent universe in many of its uniform faces but there’s another inexplicable face within the carpet that’s utterly different, that’s not violent. Close to it, yes, because of the expedition, or apparently ruthless pace, of features of compassion so woven within a stricken moment that it seems to strike, even as it rescues; fierce rescue of line into incredible eyes drawn by holy and daemonic masters schooled for timeless ages by the hand of god.”
She sipped again from a transparent pool on da Silva’s palette.
“In the meantime I am content to be glanced at by those eyes in my stricken moments.” She conjured up Francis’s resurrected face in the shadow of a walking canvas on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green. “Sometimes I know dear Francis that you envy those eyes and dream of the perfect tyranny of love one needs to imitate, it seems, in the chaos of human freedom, human laziness.”
She paused for a moment and then continued in another voice—“I see it differently for my part within myself. I see the eyes of god, the ruthless hand that paints one’s breath to save it, as a measure of the incompatibility of my understanding. And that leads me to prize freedom above all else in time; to restrain from investing in absolutes. I have been ill I know for some time, wretched fever, wretched delirium. Incompatibility is an ugly word. It breeds intolerance. Less ugly however if one accepts the many faces of a conjurer’s universe. To accept incompatible visions, to accept what is like and unlike oneself, to accept the tricks of nature as a versatile warning that truth exists but stands on unfathomable foundations, and still to believe in the unity of the self, is to run fleetingly (but sometimes securely) in a presence of glory….”
She fell back on her pillows exhausted. Glanced up at the clock on the mantelshelf. Francis would be home in an hour or so. The clock’s design was a fossil spider separate and distinct on the wall of the room yet integral to the reflection of her hands as they paused timelessly on each minute of the hour before advancing again and again through each apparent respite or lull within the seamless constellation they wove blown across spaces into each niche or grave or womb or cranny of existence.
She roused herself, folded the pages she had written, arose from bed, crossed over to her postbox. It occurred to her then to wonder whether Francis possessed his own postbox, perhaps near at hand, somewhere in the sky of the house and whether she moved in it, like a character in space, for other eyes in a coming time to read or see in many moods and lights. Perhaps at the end of the day an apparition of truth would ascend, very frail, yet incapable of being extinguished.
*
Francis turned from Holland Park Gardens into Holland Park Avenue and began to walk towards Royal Crescent on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green.
He was filled with a sense of absurd contentment, absurd peace, that was nevertheless profound and real though susceptible to uneasiness like the memory of a pool when a stone smites each reflected brow or cloud-creature that hovers over it. The absurdity arose from the notion of a trial run for “the resurrection of the body” this winter morning in London. What a long way one has to go to begin all over again through a tissue of masquerades and self-deceptions….
What would passersby say if he came up to them and explained—“I have a page from my book (I have been working at it as far back as I can remember) addressed to you that I wrote this morning when the sun rose and Julia slept. Let me read it to you.
*
Dear Passerby,
Here I am. I died twenty-five years ago. But here I am. I shall die twenty-five years from now perhaps and here I am, large as eternal life, on this side of the grave. It’s such a fraction of time, a pinprick of time, in the age of the universe — twenty-five years — that wherever one stands and lives (on this bank or the other of the grave) one is resurrected.Wherever time flies — on this bank or the other of the trench of the sky — the centuries are pinpricks of implicit otherness or implicit wholeness or incalculable extension in and beyond each prison of existence. That is freedom, that is the royalty of freedom, all men are kings, women queens. I shall crown Julia.”
Francis had buttonholed a couple, a tall young man in a black bowler hat and a lady in furs, and was reading his manifesto of revolution to them. It was a misty day, quite mild, as if it were already spring. They stared hard at him, murmured something, words of incredulity mixed with courtesy. Perhaps they could not believe their eyes or ears. He turned from them to another passerby dressed in a loud check coat who carried two bottles of milk — one in each hand — that he raised almost threateningly, abusively, as Francis began to read. Francis stopped and the black milkman proceeded along the pavement.
“Coup d’état of a queen, the voluntary surrender of powers by a king, by myself, is easier to accomplish with a hand that waves a milk bottle in the cradle of space”, Francis murmured and laughed at himself, at the absurdity of himself, “than by my resurrection’s striking body. I shall give Julia the child she needs. I swear it.”
The bowler hat shone, as it too receded along the pavement, to bestow on him a sense of being clothed or re-made, of being painted by da Silva across distances on either side of a cradle or a grave, the furs the lady wore began to melt into human skins, the bottles of milk vaguely twinkled like stars half-smothered in a blanket of cloud. They vanished into a queue of passengers who had been standing for some time now at a bus stop, further along the pavement, close to a hole in the ground in which workmen were descending.
Not absurdity really he thought as he arose with their fractured soil on him. An unexpected shaft hit him all at once, like another blow from da Silva’s brush, as he came half-way along the half-moon park of Royal Crescent on the Holland Park Avenue side.
Across the road from him rose the façade of the unfinished hotel situated on a site that had previously held, in Francis’s other lifetime, a garage, ancient offices or residences. Its rectangular face looked brown in the misty winter morning like dressed earth. A spirit of everyday craftsmanship, low-keyed sophistication, ascended there out of a trench of previous buildings and Francis wondered again about the shaft in his limbs, about his manifesto or revolutions and lives. And it seemed, all at once, in being painted anew into existence, into resurrection, one comes alive to a humour of cosmos that distances one from oneself … in drawing one back to oneself … one’s need for oneself, one’s blindness to oneself. So that the very geography of divided circumstance, on this bank or that of the reflected cosmos, creates a stranger population in a self that seeks to return to itself as a new creation.
He stopped and examined the premises closely and it came home to him that he had been hit by the apparently unschooled hand in the four naked trees that ran along the pavement before the face of the new hotel. (Perhaps it was another assault by a painter’s brush, a number of which da Silva kept by his palette.) They seemed equally neither to stir nor to sing and yet they ran with a song of the earth, song of a melancholy homecoming to a universal city he loved on both banks of father time.