And across the water Epstein’s Rima flew close to the ground above implicit rivers and bodies of water from continent to continent, South America to Europe.
Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were characteristic English parkland, designed for a queen, in which apparently alien, apparently archaic, apparently natural, freedoms and fates reside, with a degree of serenity, at the heart of the universal city da Silva loved.
Queen Julia possessed three ladies-in-waiting.
One was da Silva’s Jen who came towards her, it seemed, in the humour of cosmos, from a bank of posterity.
Then there was Eleanor Rigby, implicitly clad in furs, who had already appeared, it seemed (Francis seemed uncertain of the resemblance as he cast an eye upon her charms within da Silva’s paintings), that very morning with the painted bowler-hatted young man and with the black milkman in Holland Park Avenue. Perhaps she had been taken by surprise when Julia pricked a stone and summer flew out of a winter grave enveloped in animal skins and furs in the humour of the cosmos.
Lastly there was Rima, in her bird sanctuary, goddess of nature and of fire, in Hudson’s Green Mansions, transported abstractly by Epstein into Hyde Park.
Jen (who was herself of royal Inca blood like a bird of sun) possessed the spirit of the sanctuary in her body as well as she approached the Round Pond from Bayswater Road in the comedy of da Silva’s coronation of the womb. Two months and a day pregnant she was and da Silva had insinuated both the mimesis of catastrophe and the recovery of the foetus of the gods in the elongated feather he planted in her body from within his own loins (as if he dreamt of his own native animal resurrection — animal approximation to the divinity of the rescued self — in a body of art to which he was married).
Dreamt of the shadowplay of a majestic principle of light, that billowed effortlessly, in a rich complication of judgement day honeymoon between universal gods and goddesses one painted as approximations to resurrected selves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of heaven or that bank of earth.
He had, out of religious necessity, religious privacy, put Jen — his own wife — into the canvas for without the down-to-earth, day-to-day, night-to-night, games they played, he had no gateway himself into the serenity of the queen he painted (or into the recovery of father time’s solemn funerals, and wakes of honeymoons, in which one is involved, within the human abyss, each minute of the day and night).
In the same token without the grotesquerie of animal instinct, that clothed Eleanor Rigby in furs, without the indolence of a winter grave, which had been smitten in a flash, until it bled a new creation or summer sun, he possessed no foothold in the unpredictability of the seasons, the savage lightnings of Christ, the tiger.
Lady-in-waiting Eleanor had been joined by her husband, the bowler-hatted young man, Harlequin Rigby. In the distance, under the trees, stood Leonard, the black milkman, as if to accentuate an intensity of approximations built into resurrection day carnival.
A close look again confirmed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Eleanor was none other than the lady-in-furs and Harlequin none other than self-made ironmonger’s son whom Francis had buttonholed that very morning on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green, when he dived into an accumulative masque of tradition with a page from his book to be lodged there, out of instantaneous rebellion, out of instantaneous grief, twenty-five years ago when Julia died and the ironmonger’s wedding began.
Eleanor’s behaviour now seemed both rich and marvellously eccentric as Francis’s pen dug into the page of masques of tradition on the other side of the grave (in the land of the living), on this side of the cradle (in the land of the unborn), until both positions became co-existent with day-to-day lives on the prick of a pin where populations danced in immensities of time since the earth began. Each letter or line was furred and thick. It may have been father time’s grief, it may have been father time’s lust, that set in train a pattern of subconscious and unconscious pages on that memorable day of loss and pain he endured. Until he was driven to write into existence — as fruit of his own body — a self-made/self-created son and self-made/self-created wife for that son.
Where his lost peerless Julia was all delicacy and foam in the sea of time, this half-accursed Eleanor was all thickness and coarseness of soil on the reluctant beach of harlequin natures. As though he needed the thunder and lightning of a sexual revolution to shake Eleanor out of Julia’s resurrected sea until her breasts grew large as clay yet rich as waves of gold.
Clay and gold are premature spirits of awakening perhaps, da Silva thought, as he turned another page in Francis’s book, premature pre-existent beginnings to property and wealth, premature post-existent beginnings to creation, that summon up therefore a harsh spur or reminder of potentialities mixed into fields of indifference to life, callousness mixed into hope, war into peace, reluctant or unfulfilled lives into apparently lived or living or born lives.
And thus he was drawn to Eleanor and Harlequin and distant Leonard as to his own children, his own half-created past and half-uncreated future, peculiarly tragic, peculiarly hopeful, in its capacity to relate to strangers, to the gaiety and the madness in others who are utterly strange to oneself yet utterly true to oneself as to a dialogue between creator and created….
Eleanor and Harlequin had stopped and were sitting on a bench in the park as if to reconnoitre their approaches to Queen Julia.
Harlequin began to change his winter morning gear and to put on flannels and an open-necked shirt. He executed this with such ritual propriety that no one spotted the slightest impropriety on his part.
On the other hand all eyes in the park were rooted in Eleanor’s thick golden flesh as if to imbue her with self-made projections and characteristics. Perhaps she was a fortunate film star come back from the dead to play a nude scene, as she stripped out of her furs in broad daylight into a voluptuous body and a light grassgreen summer dress.
Harlequin was naturally an indolent man with a curious suppressed twinkle in his eye, blue, black, sometimes red, like an inner (minuscule and elusive) mask of blue, black, red blood he wore within flesh and bone.
His affairs with his wife were normal, even inhibited, in tone. “Sex is a complex theatre”, Francis wrote, “in which father inhabits son, rebukes son, fights with son over the possession of a resurrected property of lust….”
All eyes were rooted in the half-open field of paint that Eleanor wore. Was it the beginnings of a gateway into the fantasy of a queen, into a genuine mystery of serenity, as father time fought with the sons of time, played rhapsodically with the daughters of time …?
“My father was fascinated by handguns,” said Harlequin suddenly, “duelling pistols, revolvers, rifles, the lot. He had quite a collection which included the replica of a fifteenth-century European handcannon of a type probably used at a later date in the conquest of Peru and Mexico. It was certainly used in Europe as we know from recent excavations. My father told me he acquired it from a gentleman who lived in Holland Park Gardens with his black queen and wife a long time ago — one Francis Cortez Esq. My father told me she died the day he was married, the year I was born. Born.” He was smiling inwardly at himself. “It’s all a fiction Eleanor, I’m sure, a recurring dream in which something happens, grips one, tends to release one…. My life’s a page in another man’s gun or book.”
Eleanor wasn’t listening. She had heard it all before except the matter of Julia’s pigmentation. This interested her, this aroused her.