Black Marsden Read online

  “The body of the law marches on. Yes. I know as head of state. Step by step in some parts of the world it shrinks into the self-conscious enlargement of political institutions which may even claim, mark well, to be bastions of freedom….”

  Beehive Knife shrugged. “I give up,” he said laconically. “I give up.”

  “Give up!” Marsden appeared to be startled, stroked his beard in Goodrich’s mind and mirror. “Give up to the theatre. What a capitulation that would be.” He growled and laughed. “The play within a play which repudiates the play of bias.”

  “Do you mean,” said Beehive Knife matter-of-factly, “that the theatre will now gobble us up, become a modern sanctuary?”

  “The ground of the theatre is not a sanctuary since it evokes step by step a curious ironic decapitation of over-compensation ritual. Step by step we are fused into ironical contrasts subsisting on each other. We are fused into ironical self-portraits, furnitures and parts, into our own omniscient obscenity, property or solipsism. We ripen, yes ripen beyond every sanctuary.”

  “Into whom or what?” asked Goodrich.

  “Into an abnormal head, abnormal state, abnormal clown, abnormal self-trial. Surely that is self-evident.”

  Goodrich stared into the mirror in his sitting-room which caught the reflection of the sky outside the window and also the furniture inside the room so that it seemed to rain the very objects around him….

  As I stared into the mirror—as into a private page in my innermost book—I was immersed in that still rain of shared toys and objects dispersed into the sound of a passing car, aeroplane, the rattle of a windowpane: the scarecrow rain of the twentieth century. Only yesterday it was, I recalled, I had seen a small boy step from his bicycle into a space suit. Marsden’s head of state I now thought, sketching absurdly, stood upon that boy’s feet and stepped into his space suit (innermost sanctuary in an alien universe) which unrolled itself into his future and mine as far as eye could see. I was possessed by that dual child—the head-of-a-man-on-a-child in Black Marsden’s Space Suit: the sanctuary of a modern Narcissus which transcended all ages….

  “Goodrich,” said Marsden. “Have you heard what I have been saying? You seemed lost in that curious mirror of yours. Is it convex or concave, by the way?” Goodrich gave a start. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of a child in his space suit with a large head on his shoulders whom I saw on the street corner yesterday. He could have been your son, Marsden.”

  “My son. What an idea.”

  “There was a resemblance. I recall it distinctly. A childish resemblance of course. And by the way perhaps I should mention that in addition to the space suit he was playing at Hogmanay with a couple of other children. He held a piece of coal in his hands with which he had put a beard on his features. Perhaps he had seen you passing.” Goodrich could not help laughing. “He was playing the dark man you see who crosses the New Year threshold into the Moon.” Goodrich stopped. Marsden’s attention was riveted upon the door where Jennifer stood. She had come into the doorway so silently that no one knew how long she had been there. A pregnant silence descended in which the very raining objects in the mirror seemed suddenly to curve, to tauten like a new wave stilled afresh by the camera, hypnotic camera.

  Goodrich was horrified. One half of her face was covered: draped in a towel which came around her head, knotted at the back. One half of her mouth, one eye, the greater part of her head were bandaged as though she had had an accident. Burnt. Disfigured. Irrational conclusion perhaps but so poignant and real it possessed Goodrich with the force of a revelation, intense self-discovery, womb of fascination. Whom or what was it which judged and acquitted one in the final analysis, and whom or what did one see oneself or acquit when one looked at a still or moving figure? Personality, charm, beauty or so many pounds of flesh?

  And now those pounds of flesh, legs, body were marching into the room. “The hideousness of all charm, the hideousness of all compulsion,” Goodrich spoke aloud before he could stop himself. Jennifer eyed him with her unbandaged eye.

  “Hideous!” she said. “What an unkind thing to say, Clive. Have you never seen a mud pack, a beauty pack? I have done my right half …” she pressed her right cheek …“and now I’m on to my left.” She pressed her left cheek.

  A mud pack, thought Goodrich. He was shaken. Why not stone pack or wood pack?

  Whom or what did one see or acquit in the sculptured or dismembered presences of history? To what extent was one capable of real choice, real judgement, real perception, the making up of one’s own buried harassed mind about the secret of personality?

  Jennifer’s explanation was common-or-garden enough but it highlighted rather than depressed the sensational workshop of the gods—a sense of gross alchemy which had been fired as he turned and saw the picture framed in the door at the end of a long-forgotten room or corridor or drama of relationships, from the day he emerged head foremost from another body into the light of the sun. He was so immersed now, so steeped in that reflection, that Marsden’s lips moved now but he heard nothing. He may have been Jennifer’s doctor or husband or father or midwife or all combined, upbraiding her or consoling her but the words were stilled within the objects in the mirror of time. Traumatic target. Goodrich began to leave the room. He paused at the door for an instant as if to confirm that gross stillness, sack of coals, mud head, stone head, wood head, gross pounds of flesh: as if to confirm the necessity to choose (or to be free to choose) someone or something of his own secret will.

  Then as he moved finally and withdrew from the room with a sense of powerful dejection, he recalled the fissure or crack or breach he had sensed before in the bandaged head of stillness. There was, after all, this fissure or crack within the womb of implacable illusion that enveloped him, stunned him. There was this dawning thread of complex consciousness woven into every intensity of fabric—complex shores and biases of memory. Easter Island enigma of birth—every lighthouse of soul—on the shores of Scotland and around the globe.

  8

  He set out on one of his favourite walks from Trinity to Cramond; descended through Starbank Park into Starbank Road; the sea stretched before him. Occasional rags lay at the water’s edge beneath the sea wall like disembowelled toys over and beyond which the wings of sea-gulls flashed in the sun, settling in the water and on a ruffled day like this, with a gentle wind and hardly a cloud in the sky, seeming to roll or sail tenderly upon the purest green and blue reflected marbles.

  He set out along Starbank Road upon the pavement that ran close to the wall. There were houses close to the footpath on the other side of the street and on a wild blowing day when the tide was full the spray would fly toward them from the sea.

  He came to Granton Road and was steeped once again in the senses of the neighbourhood, antennae toward past times: past moorings and harbours and custom houses: the spectral feeling which both modern and ancient Edinburgh aroused in him as no other city did. Was it a reticent self-deceiving, self-revealing film of time blowing still, not yet settled into oblivion? The lines ran in his head:

  They do not always deal in blood

  Nor yet in breaking human bones,

  For Quixot-like they knock down stones.

  Regardless they the mattock ply

  To root out Scots antiquity.

  He struck away from the water’s edge now along West Granton Road, past a Ministry of Labour Training Centre and the Granton Gas Works, and towards the playing fields which bordered Silverknowes Road.

  Every time he came this way he delighted afresh in the open sky which sometimes appeared to him to knit itself into everything—into grey brick and green tree and into an everchanging mirror of space and water (where the city ran to meet the sea) as the days lengthened towards the summer solstice and the nights shortened into unpredictable spray of stars, veiled or unveiled galaxies.

  Was it, Goodrich wondered, because of that texture of sky that Edinburgh was regarded as a masculine city? Was it that
open sky which accentuated the vertically of every spire or monument raised by man or nature?

  He made his way now along Silverknowes Road back to the water’s edge and dawdled along the foreshore to Cramond. The blue, green waves curled into animated frescoes of memory that seemed to reach towards Harp’s horizons and lakes across the Atlantic: to reach also farther south into the South Americas—South American savannahs pasted upon the globe like an abstract realm within fiery longitudes.

  He recalled the sky-line of Edinburgh which he had seen for the first time, he believed, from the vicinity of the disused quarry of Craigleith. It had been a clear day like this and upon the slate of time one could see spires, the hunched back of Arthur’s Seat and the Castle.

  He recalled also a view of the Lawnmarket from the roof of St. Giles Cathedral and the rock ridge with its pattern of the Old Town accentuated against the sea of the sky.

  All these vistas seemed to curl and uncurl now into ebbing and flowing waves or tides. The sea of the sky reached everywhere, spires and rocks seemed equally fraught with energies that shot upwards but witnessed to an inherent spatial design, geology of psyche.

  He was so immersed in the depth of the present and the recollections of the past that he stumbled into a tiny rivulet running to the sea. A soaked page of newspaper lay on the ground with glaring headlines on sewage pollution beyond Cramond. Beyond Cramond, thought Goodrich. Not far from here. It seemed incredible. Near and yet far in an abstract haze of sun, rain and cloud mingling far away all of a sudden. A blissful paradox sealed his senses at that moment, an inner peace almost despite ominous headlines; he was lost again in contemplating distances. In contemplating the engineering marvel of the Firth of Forth Bridge which arched into the sky and across frescoes of water.

  *

  Goodrich arrived at last at Cramond and ascended the steps from the foreshore into the ordered village with its exquisite houses laid out like a child’s beautiful overgrown toys in which it seemed a marvel that flesh-and-blood lived. He passed the ancient church on the site of a Roman settlement before coming to a bus stop.

  Then the scene changed as the bus bore him out of the village passing a row of rather uniform-looking cottages on the right hand, open grounds on the left, into a great sweeping stretch of countryside dotted with occasional formal gardens and individual houses followed by a golf course and open lands running up to Lauriston Castle. Now he was back in Edinburgh proper, driving through rows of neat houses and shops; along Queensferry Road, through Blackhall to Dean Bridge where he alighted from the bus.

  Staring after the back of the bus which quickly vanished over the bridge Goodrich thought of the driver’s licence he possessed which had lapsed many years ago; later—though he had come into a lot of money—he was still apathetic about owning a car. He was a great walker; sometimes he would walk many miles, hop upon a bus, get off and walk again, savour every patch of wall or field or sky. Immerse himself in every historical scarecrow like a rich tramp. When he felt more luxuriously inclined he would hire a car and a chauffeur for the day, make for himself a swifter patchwork cloak, patchwork miles.

  He raised himself up now and peered over the Dean Bridge at the steep and narrow valley of the Water of Leith. Many a poor devil had taken his life here—leapt from this bridge; leapt from Sky into Creek, sudden pouring light into inexplicable darkness; suspended pawn in the workshop of the gods. The thought fascinated him—the thought of a woven texture or chessboard of visibles and invisibles: the thought that here, somewhere out there in space beneath him were squares of light and darkness in which something moved, disappeared, pawn or knight moved, bishop or king disappeared. Something moved, reappeared, flashed again, darkened….

  In his diary of infinity Goodrich had been constructing for many years a diagram to symbolize his existences on earth through intensities of love and hate. For one lived many lives, died many deaths through others. There was a renascence or flowering, or a deeper accent of eclipse upon buried personalities—actors in a tabula rasa drama—in every encounter one enjoyed or endured. Something died. Something was born. Each element of participation carried within it new and undreamt-of senses or constellations.

  Goodrich knew the Dean Bridge quite well and loved the view when he looked into the valley. Nothing perverse. He had no intention of leaping there himself. Nor was he morbidly held by past suicides, poor guardian angels roped to poorer unguarded devils sentenced by fate. Yet he was intuitively aware of enigmatic squares of suspended darkness and lights knitted into the pawn of himself (the knight, bishop, king, child of dreams in himself)—his own voluntary and involuntary chessboard.

  As he looked over the bridge with the occasional rumble of a vehicle in his back he saw not ruined man, doomed men dropping below but a curious self-portrait of himself aged five standing (or drawn) within one of those squares of light or darkness, suspended dark sentence, suspended light arena of judgement. It was a traumatic target, traumatic suspension, naïve, enigmatic grieving child with the head of lost and found men on his shoulders, lost and found self-judge, lost and found self-judged.

  He was five when his stepfather Rigby vanished in the heartland of Brazil. Vanished into a square of Bastard Sky or Creek as Harp’s father Hornby had vanished. No wonder, Goodrich mused, when he met Harp they had taken to one another like a house on fire, like lost brothers and the shadow of a curious host spectre enveloped them. They were drawn to each other upon the same square as it were—tabula rasa slate inserted into the globe.

  The strength of coincidence now seemed a property of bias. Biased property one was inclined to say. Hornby and Rigby Ltd. Goodrich could not help marvelling in himself as he stared into the distant Water of Leith. Life was stranger than property. His stepfather Rigby had vanished in Brazil the very year, the very day Hornby and Hornby had established a pattern of legend in the Arctic. It was a judgement and equally acquittal of intuitive spaces knitted into the globe. It was an intimate parallel, Pole and Equator.

  Rigby was a temperamental Scot who had made or lost fortunes in a year or a day. When he was down-and-out he knew how to scrape the bottom of the barrel. He knew how to make ends meet. (It was a lesson Goodrich’s mother had never forgotten when hard times descended upon them and Rigby vanished.) When he was well off he knew how to spend magnanimously, wholeheartedly. He made loyal friends and bitter enemies. On his disappearance it was rumoured there was more to his death than met the eye. Rumour had it he had killed a man in self-defence, killed one of his Brazilian mates, and that the rest had turned on him, crazed by the jungle, tried him, sentenced him and hanged him. A crude and bitter tale. A tale that was consistent nevertheless with a man or a god who lived extremes, extreme existences on earth.

  A tale that grew into a legend until it eclipsed all reasonable fact. But what are or were reasonable facts? Had Rigby quarrelled with his mates? Had he left them? Had he plunged towards the Orinoco or the Amazon? Had he advanced alone into the depths of the Bush? Advanced into a pawn of the elements, claustrophobic fire, claustrophobic noons, suns, claustrophobic waterfalls, precipices of sunset, tropics of night? …

  A lorry passed on the Dean Bridge. And Goodrich lit a cigarette. He smoked rarely. Stubbed it out. It tasted like a rag….

  On the book of Sky and Creek he now drew and sketched himself afresh aged five. In that sketch or square he uprooted the rain, the snow, uprooted the Equator, uprooted the Poles. Space age five.

  “What I am sketching,” Goodrich addressed his spectre of infinity in the sleeve of earth, roped to the sky of his mind, “is a kind of cartoon I suppose. Forgive me for taking such liberties, O Spectre. I am sure there are multiplications of laughter in the workshop of the gods, divine cartoons of absurd bliss.

  “Now take me at age five. That age is out there now. There are other ages, of course, I could sketch of the child in one’s heart or head. But the one I am now looking at is square five into which my stepfather vanished when I was five years old. Harp’s father
too. Rigby and Hornby Ltd. What an establishment or property of consciousness. Muse of adventure.

  “So that while it is pointless denying the sentence of the muse written into the elements, snow, ice, fire, water—while it is pointless denying this, it is justifiable, on the other hand, to dream of acquittal through a phenomenon or family tree, Brother Snow, Brother Fire. In the comedy of an interfused reading of the elements a capacity for genesis is born or reborn within us: a capacity to re-sensitize our base relations, Brother Cruelty, Brother Hate—to re-sensitize our biased globe into moveable squares within and beyond every avalanche of greed or despair: re-sensitize phenomenon fire through caveats of ice, phenomenon snow through caveats of fire, to re-sensitize the phenomenon of the Equator within each crystal flower at the Poles….”

  “Damn you!” A raucous quavering shout came. “Damn you.” A car ground to a halt. Goodrich leapt. “Are you mad?” cried the voice. “What in heaven’s name are you at? How could you … how could you step back like that off the pavement on to the road?” The driver was furious.

  “I am sorry,” said Goodrich. The voice barked afresh, angry eyes glared afresh. Then the car moved on, a brisk trail of inquisitive vehicles followed, vanished over the bridge and left Goodrich stunned, desolate. He had earned the rebuke. His spectre of infinity collapsed at his feet and lay in ruins like a beautiful imaginary pack of cards strewn everywhere; knights and kings and bishops, spades, diamonds, hearts, clubs all on their backside on the road.

  He could have been lying there now himself. Imagine that. Run over by that car. He had indeed absentmindedly stepped back on to the road. It was true. If he had been run over would he have had a flashing moment of respite to square the circle upon Sky and Creek? Square Zero? Uprooted end? Uprooted globe?

  Clothed in despondency he began to make his way slowly now along the pavement towards the bus stop hidden in a couple of trees at the end of the bridge. Then came the unearthly sound of bagpipes which made him forget himself, stop, listen. Did it rise from the old Dean village? Or did it ascend from far below in the Water of Leith? Or did it come from the city borne across the distance? The thread of music addressed him—thrilled him—immensely plaintive—conjuring up a fire music, a water music. And the fallen bishops, knights, kings, spades, hearts, heads, clubs were singing in space through Harp parallel elements….