She opened the curtains and sat at a desk by the window to await the return of Francis from Shepherd’s Bush Green, Francis the family-man saint, Francis the lover and warrior, Francis the writer, Francis the mourner and sculptor of pleasures and griefs (behind whom, like hovering posterity, was da Silva the painter and editor of Julia’s letters and Francis’s book).
She half-opened the window now and was struck by a breath of marvellously painted air, as subtle as an egg or shell of creation, at which a painter takes aim again and again in creating the parentage of earth.
What a refinement of the stake of the sun one embraces, da Silva thought as he painted Julia, on a wedding day, on a resurrection day.
What a task is the translation of the cinders of dawn into oceanic depths of musical flesh-and-blood, into seasons, into climates, into illuminated banks and islands.
She was indeed an incredibly lovely woman, one apparitional foot in the early twentieth century, the other in the late twentieth century. And he was tempted to speak to her now himself (he was sure she knew he was here, brush in hand), to place himself between Francis, the family-man saint, and Francis, the lover and king, as aroused subject, aroused reporter of approximate existences within the eye of the needle’s gate in each delicate brushstroke he inscribed upon earth and heaven.
But at that moment came the sound of a step in the hall. Francis was back. He came into the room, flung his hat and coat upon a rack where they half-clung, half-bulged, into ghostly armour like refined charcoal. Julia laughed, with that incredible touch of gaiety men and women irrationally possess, in the darkest or brightest times, at the dressed cinders of noon, black afternoon diamond hat, black morning illustrious coat.
A body of mutated associations seemed to cluster and arise out of wedding day, resurrection day, carnival as Francis held her to him and kissed her on the lips as if he had lost her and found her again on the minute speck of a star that shivered in her eyes.
“Dear Francis,” she wrote from that minuscule star as his hand slid down her back, on to her legs and thighs, into animate gold, dark refined gold as into a variety of exaggerated premises.
She disentangled herself. In the light of the room the black diamond hat, the black morning coat, shone with answering humour.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“Into another universe,” he said flippantly yet apparently quite seriously.
“Did you buy the fruit and the vegetables?” she asked, equally seriously.
“Fruit? Vegetables?” His voice was suddenly blank, naïve. Perhaps he had forgotten, in that instant, the necessity for foodbearing tree in the shiver of a star from which she posted her letters to him around the universe. Their inner reflections joined and swam. She shook him suddenly, her breasts moved like the implicit wave of a ship, a melting ship from which horizons grew to translate each living word.
“Let’s remember today,” she said suddenly, sombrely, from within that wave that descended to her waist and left her suddenly naked like a flurry of pages of surf da Silva unbound around a rescued body.
Francis drew her into bed. The sound of a faint call in the distance, a telephone beak in the shell of the sea, a telegram, rather than a letter, drew them into each other’s arms. Perhaps they were attuned to living ink as the surf ascended once again, to charcoal voices of birds in foodbearing tree at the heart of fire, to midnight eyes in the middle of broad daylight.
“I spent the morning writing letters,” she confessed inwardly. Their bodies clung together into the language of a living tool, cultivated living bed, carpentered living tables and chairs in the room around them like attendant yet invisible courtiers, flesh-and-blood wood, grassgrown parks and ponds, carven benches, milestones of penetrative flesh in the theatre of a bed that secreted the memories of lives lived or unlived a generation and more ago, a generation and more to come.
It was a strategy of wedded apparitions in each postbox of memory within a quest for the resurrection of the self….
They arose from bed, took the car and drove to Bayswater Road; parked and went for a stroll in Kensington Gardens.
Da Silva aimed his brush at a cloud in the sky shaped like Mount Olympus on which a god and a goddess sat. A drop of paint as subtle as the star that shivered in Julia’s eyes, or intangible as the bruise that ran on Montezuma’s brow, within creative and re-creative approximations of resurrected self, descended and clothed Francis and Julia now. Twinkling eyes, fingertips, eyebrows. Fleeting seasons. One world and another.
They were astonished at their newfound powers. Prick a newborn stone, smooth as the forehead of time, and fly across chasms of sensibility and insensibility.
And a tendency arose in da Silva’s paintings — as if his misgiving was theirs — for winter to extend beyond each envelope they wore, or autumn to appear suddenly in a carpet of leaves, convicted or bruised in a flash for natural indolence, and for the trees to part into the sculpture of a horseman riding magnificently and motionlessly into a falling horizon that seemed to embrace the Serpentine.
Thus there was summer around them impressed with the latent bruises of winter. There was the judgement of autumn upon them led by a bridle of fate. There was the smitten light they wore of refinements of water and fire. They paused in the shadow of the beautiful trees close to the Round Pond. A hubbub arose, an outcry, a rushing of legs and arms that seemed one with the harness of expedition they had witnessed.
A crowd was gathering at the edge of the pond which stretched a hundred yards or two from bank to bank.
Francis and Julia quickened their pace. At last they stood at the edge of the water and saw nothing but their own mountainous shadow there on cloud Olympus.
And then the light flashed upon a log. It seemed a log until it disclosed the knuckles of a hand. A child’s hand around a child’s toy or ship. The body in the water was so submerged it may have been brown or black miscarried foetus of the gods within Olympus. Save for the white gloves or blossoming skin of its hands where these emerged like paint on the glittering dark surface of sky in water. Was this the harlequin pigmentation of oceans resurrected backwards into toy ship or fleet? “Let me … let me …” cried Julia, secreting a letter there she intended for Francis across a generation and more “hold it. Let me rescue it.”
But the crowd was oblivious of the cry she raised, of the spontaneous irrationality of posted letter and saved or hoarded communication. There came a long-drawn-out insistent siren that dimmed the telephone beak in the sea, the rush of an ambulance towards resurrected pond, the speeding away of wheels. Then a vacancy in da Silva’s body of the globe as populations melted or vanished.
“When did it all happen?” said Julia in bewilderment. “My unborn … I was taken ill.”
“Your unborn … Our unborn … Their unborn …” He seemed to be waving at an elusive target.
Da Silva murmured soothingly to a shadow on the mountainous reflection of heaven. “Perhaps a spiritual fleet is implied that will take us.”
“Take us where?” Julia cried.
“To a coronation,” said da Silva.
Francis listened too. He heard, as da Silva spoke, the faint sigh or rattle of milk bottles coming across the park as though to announce the arrival of ladies-in-waiting to Queen Julia.
4
The magnificent sculptured horse and horseman called Physical Energy continued to move motionlessly above the Serpentine.