“Black? Was Julia black?”
“Black with the flame of the sun when it shines in snow. A painter would give his eye-tooth … Black. White. My father said she was a creole beauty from the island of Zemi in the West Indies. A long time ago. He — I mean Francis — apparently vanished within a month or two of her death. My old man was intrigued by the whole affair. All sorts of stories circulated. She was quite wealthy you see. My old man was able to secure quite a collection of guns from the Cortez estate. It all seems an age ago like the Spanish Civil War and all that in which my father enlisted. So you see he was in his forties or fifties — and that’s a body of years I would think — when he met my mother. An old man in fact. If he’d been killed as a young man in Spain where would I be now? Indeed sometimes I wonder …” He half-smiled at Eleanor who had caught sight, in that instant, of Leonard under the trees. “A body of years and yet it’s as fleeting as a bullet. My old man used to say a hundred years are as fleeting as an arrow that flies from hand to heart.”
“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” said Eleanor expressing an implicit preference for the hand in the cradle, coup d’état by Leonard’s milk bottles. Yet she shuddered a little in the canvas da Silva was painting as though a cat’s rippling tread of populations moved upon her flesh in Leonard’s dancing tread as he seemed to advance towards her from under the trees. The breeze strengthened and the painting fell upon a mimic battlefield. (It was a fantasy of love and hate Harlequin entertained when they were out in the open together.)
She lay there, lovely and prostrate, half-slain, her legs raised to the bullet of history until da Silva lifted her into an upright position against the foot of his easel. An advancing army, on milk-bottle horseback, applauded and Harlequin’s inner eye, in painted canvas, took aim at Leonard. He (Harlequin) elected to coffin himself in space, as she (Eleanor) reclined at his feet, and to be at liberty to patrol the air above her like a brilliant centaur in his own right in the sky; a brilliant conversion of wizards and witches into broomstick technologies and metamorphoses of resurrection in science.
Nothing was demanded of him except a satellite of appearances and disappearances, the trick of terrestrial and super-terrestrial battlefields, an opera of love and war through clay and gold and bottle-necked glass and rockets to the stars.
His apparent detachment — his air of non-existence in the upper air as Eleanor reclined on the ground (and Leonard bestrode a bottle), the air he cultivated that he had never been born, had been extinguished by a phantom bullet from a gun in the middle of a modern or ancient war his father fought — ignited a sensual flare, a sensual target of undreamt-of promiscuities, bodies and limbs scattered far and wide on a painting of green.
Perhaps an element of summer telepathy was at stake which inscribed his thoughts into a sculpture of non-existences, a sublimation of existences, grounded in meaningful obscurities of motive or action, gunplay in the ancient Wild West, film of violence, escapism through violence.
Shared thoughts of the box in his head, the bed in his sky, centred on his father’s handcannon as uncertain cradle or trigger of annunciation to smite the world with the lightning madness of the human species, the lightning gaiety of the human species, obsessional codes of the lost king (the lost queen) of space that Francis mourned in backward resurrections of Harlequin’s body before he was born and had been conceived to die….
“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” Eleanor insisted.
“Huge beasts? Are they?” Harlequin caught himself. “Not at all. Three-handed but not huge. We’re back in the fifteenth century, remember? The issue then was not size but the additional component one required in order to take aim, to fire. Each target one slew, each body one killed, survived in a ghostly mechanic at one’s side. That was my father’s vision of the future in the past.”
“I always think of cannon …” Eleanor insisted.
“Handcannon,” Harlequin cried. “Handcannon my love. Quite small really. The bore is less than an inch, the barrel just over a foot. Devil to fire. And so an additional hand, called a serpentine, an ‘S’-shaped piece, was built against the stock. There stood one’s ghostly mechanic, my dear lady-in-waiting Eleanor. It was he or it who held the lighted match — as if it were the first or last star or sun in the hand of creation — and moved it by degrees to ignite the powder one had primed into the barrel of one’s gun. And so one’s hands were free to devote themselves to aligning the gun, to taking aim, some sort of rudimentary aim. One aimed at the enemy with both hands. In the meantime a fraction of a second’s evolutionary delay in the serpentine hand of the mechanic at one’s side, in igniting the ammunition of a star, could make all the difference between life and death. The third hand at one’s side became the enemy — a fraction of a second’s delay made him (or it) into the enemy. And the third hand on the enemy’s gun became yourself, your friend. A fraction of a second’s delay there might save your life, by allowing you to fire first. That was my father’s theory of targets of genesis through which to assemble a maker of worlds within the premature or precipitate materials in the very beginnings of creation. It was nothing to do with the size of the blanket of death or life (or the size of the gun, the size of the thunder) but rather with the mystery of survival, the mystery of conception in a third hand or ghostly recruit at one’s side. All evolution is the subtlest marriage of opposites within a scene of conflict….”
The paint on his lips cracked and much that he said seemed to vanish into the ground as the sensuous bullet Leonard fired hit him on the lips with which he kissed Eleanor with sudden zest, with limbo zest.
“Perhaps they both aimed and missed each other,” cried Eleanor scrambling up and tidying her dress as she saw Queen Julia turn and begin to descend towards the Serpentine.
*
Da Silva’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park had been painted with open stretches and with clumps of trees — oak, horsechestnut, ash, elm, cedar, beech, lime, willow.
Silver-grey roads of marvellous summer light tinctured by autumn and spring ghostly mechanics in the barks of trees wound their way from Bayswater Road to Kensington Road and Knightsbridge, from Hyde Park Gate around the Serpentine canal to Broad Walk.
Distances in each painting foreshortened themselves or deepened themselves into underground links or streams or rivers.
He brushed in a number of children’s swings within a hundred yards of Bayswater Road.
An intimacy of line and tone, the flashing wings of a gull over the Round Pond, shone through a slanting element like the thinnest lines of rain that rocked a miniature ocean upon which to embark around the globe from the sunrise of the early sixteenth century into resurrections of dawn in the late twentieth century.
It had been a long apparently stable cloud of night over the sun’s delayed apparition and a swan or night-headed duck settled on da Silva’s ocean as though an egg of cosmos were hatching within the hands of the foetus of the gods as it floated backwards and forwards in time….
These were in part Julia’s thoughts as she descended with Francis from the black/brown/white child clutching a riddled toy ship in which a letter to posterity had been posted. A letter from the grave of the Round Pond to the grave of the Serpentine. A letter from nondescript child to Shelley’s dead wife, Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself one cold winter night in the early years of the nineteenth century.
Posterity lies in the past as much as in the future.