Black Marsden (4 page)

“What do women make of John the Baptist? They never cease to love him. In virtue or love lies a certain animus of history—a certain necessity to conceive real dragons….”

“Do you mean,” said Knife, grinning still, “that love of freedom makes a virtue of intolerance?”

“Read the times in which we live side by side with ages past. Freedom is a baptism in rivers of blood.” He flung open the Book of Knox and read:

Black Marsden stopped abruptly, slammed fast his book, and sipped the tall amber liquid at his elbow (left elbow, bar sinister, Goodrich thought).

“It is vital, Jennifer,” he said drawing close to her, “that you conceive the dragon of freedom as you play Salome. Conceive or visualize likenesses in our own time if these help.” His brow was knitted, corrugated. His cheeks seemed to bulge and sink into the physiognomy of a map—watersheds, rivers and valleys writ small but arresting and dangerous. His beard or forest fell and concealed his throat and extended upwards along his temples in wild but still decorous rings—a combination of savagery and urbanity. He stepped back at this moment and concealed his body behind a large red chair draped with a unique and rich combination of sackcloth and ashes he had bought for Tabula Rasa. He stretched his hands up and sideways as though the map of his features had acquired wings.

He quoted John Knox:

The words issued from him with such startling conviction in
this
age, though far removed from
that
age, that he stood like one possessed by a devil or by a saint. His archaic/modern lips, Goodrich felt, were turning red as dark cherries where Knife had slashed into his beard which dripped now (in the theatre of action he evoked) not with blood but with greying winters. It was the strangest climax he rehearsed and Jennifer Gorgon was held by this: schooled, as it were, to a point of resolution. Affected, however, by a hint of anti-climax, of world-weariness perhaps he could not wholly suppress. But whatever reservations she may have had about the riddle of his performance—intense reality or intense unreality, intense vividness or intense
vicariousness
—she was animated by a virtuous crescendo of blood which addressed her across the ages.

Goodrich glimpsed her with the scarecrow eye which now possessed him: she stood upon the brink of a new and inevitable mainstream rebellion of soul—a new cult of fascination with freedom. Marsden continued, blissfully unaware apparently of the spell he had cast upon all:

He stopped now and stepped away from his scarlet and black slate and Goodrich discerned upon the unique and rich material compounded of sackcloth and ashes which draped the chair in the room, intricate scenes stitched in black thread and therefore so reticent in background as to be almost invisible until one’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkroom/backcloth dimensions implicit in the scarecrow. He could see also—as his eyes grew accustomed to the strange reticent fabric of catastrophe—the huge head of John the Baptist woven into the globe. At first, he wondered, would it send a delicious shudder through Salome/Jennifer as though those blind eyes could
see
emotional tumbling rivers, emotional fires, passions unleashed in volcanoes within which whole populations tumbled?

It was an intensely modern dream enacted from West to East as well as within epic abortions—stateless refugees/planned or engineered castaways.

“Look,” Marsden said, softly pointing to the intimate and intricate scenes draped across my Goodrich sitting-room until everything became an anomaly. “What could be more modern, more consistent with act-of-man slate as well as act-of-god slate? Now, Jennifer,” his tone changed and he gave her a stick of chalk, “don’t be afraid to sketch. It’s rich stuff and everything you do can be erased.”

“Sketch what?” asked Jennifer.

“Why, sketch how he sees you.”

“How he sees me? What do you mean?”

“It’s your triumph, Jennifer. That’s what I mean. The head of John the Baptist is yours. The ball is in your court. Whatever he says, whatever archaic or modern dubbing we put on his lips—whatever fierce dubbing we use—and for that matter it could be selective speeches from contemporary figures in the
New
York
Times
or the
London
Telegraph
or Reuter’s despatches—whatever words I dub on those lips, it’s the eyes in the head which count in the end, which
speak.
How do they
see
you, Jennifer? You are our resurgent Gorgon, our twentieth-century fascination with freedom. How do those eyes address you? How do they see you, Jennifer? Go on. Sketch….”

Jennifer held the stick of chalk in her hand. A tide of defiance began to rise slowly within her, almost inevitably from the canvas in which Marsden sought to immerse her. Love, hate, love, hate. Now with sudden perversity she drew a square box with a slit running down the middle. Marsden sipped his drink, sensed the rising tide in her. “Is that all, Jennifer?”

“He sees me as a pillarbox,” she said drily. “An old pillarbox—Martian female perhaps—but a pillarbox all the same. I suppose he’s right. I consume everything nowadays.”

“What do you consume?”

Jennifer thought a little, hardened herself against the Master. “The post is free,” she said at last. “Once you lick the right stamp. Anything, everything goes into it. This morning I
received
a book (from whom I haven’t the slightest notion)
entitled”
—she paused deliberately—“How to Fuck.” She spoke almost unflinchingly, Goodrich thought, and looked into the eyes of John the Baptist with a strange yet child-like cynicism.

Harp arrived a few days later. I was the only one in and I ushered him into the sitting-room. He insisted he had had a late breakfast at his hotel and all I could persuade him to have was coffee. He was a chain smoker and with subtle rings, which dissipated themselves into the high ceiling of the room, wreathed himself in evanescent hills and valleys. He could hardly have been more than five feet two inches tall. His legs were short and his arms long. He wore a long white overcoat—semi-military, semi-medical.

His face, however, charmed and delighted me beyond measure. Perhaps the kindest most unpredictable face I had ever seen. A face and head which may have been dug up from some forgotten workshop of the gods where it had lain discarded on the ground or condemned as useless ages ago; so much so that his hair looked white and trodden and there was a kicked look to his chin—a kind of unpolished stubble where the feet of the elements had trod.

He seemed the representation of technical vicissitudes of feeling which sought endlessly to cope with an interminable mopping-up operation across a giant landscape, an enigmatic landscape that was bound to dwarf him in a sense.

He spoke of his environment and of the seasons. One vignette he drew was an evocation of late September. The trees around his house were clothed in a symphony of colour, yellows and reds and scarlets; and long flitting shadows of clouds, light as a feather in the water, mingled with a palette of sun.

He developed his sketches and evoked such an intimate canvas of his backgrounds that we stood there at the edge of an
enormous
blend of intensely blue water and sky, enormous spectrum of sky and water, until night fell and we struggled down the hill and up again with wood to light a fire in the middle of the earth. To live in a house in the wilderness (cold sky) is like tunnelling a cave into the earth (cold earth) and the ghosts of fires or stars long-dead are rekindled.

“Do you know, Harp,” I said. “Here we are in a house in Edinburgh. And the globe itself seems to be at our fingertips. I have never seen you before. And yet the fact remains that I feel as if we have known each other from the beginning of time. It’s another of Marsden’s phantoms or fascinations.” I nodded with a kind of submission to Marsden’s mirror or globe.

Harp nodded too, his face swept by a backlash of feeling—mopping-up, preserving relationships. “If we probe and reflect and think we may discover we are related, Goodrich.”

“Impossible,” I said. “It’s one thing to evoke a magical commonwealth (all races, all times). It’s another thing to prove it. Tell me. Who is he really? Who is Doctor Marsden?”

Harp’s face was besieged by a sudden passion for
self-abandonment
—mopping-up as well as preserving and screening intimate relations within the ghostly family of man. I waited.

“
My
father’s name was Hornby,” Harp volunteered, and appeared to go off at a tangent.

“Hornby,” I said. “That rings a bell. There was a John Hornby. I’ve read about him. George Whalley wrote about him. I quote: ‘the way he died has raised obstacles almost
insurmountable
to anybody who wishes to discover the true nature of that vivid and desolate man’.”

“End of quote,” said Harp with his mopping-up smile again. “Imagine Hornby’s ghost tapping out fiery morse in the heart of a Canadian wilderness.”

“Was he a legend or was he a man?” I asked. “What do we know of him? I have read that he was quite amiable, even gregarious as a young man but all that changed as he grew older and became addicted to solitariness, courage and endurance. He died on an expedition into the Arctic in the late nineteen twenties.”

Harp looked sad. “My father’s name was also Hornby.
Unsung,
unmourned who died on the same day, the same year as the other legendary John Hornby.” There was a self-mocking air of gentle tautology in Harp’s voice.

A sudden silence descended like the ticking of a heart in the sun, ticking of a clock in the room, in the snow. And now all at once, in response to Harp’s tangent, I could feel a certain winged shadow of time, a certain winged stage of time settling around me within the commonwealth of man sponsored by ancient Marsden.

I could see upon my inner book, whose pages now seemed to turn backwards, an immense white world in the scarecrow literature and workshop of the gods, a world of falling snow, landscape upon riverscape of snow, treacherous works and poems of ice: a single false step out there in that creation of a wilderness was hell.

I felt I had been transported there into the intimate
wildernesses
Harp painted and stood face to face with Hornby himself.

“When it falls like that,” Hornby said, “we’re in for the blackest spell. An almighty freeze-up. Madness to put a foot out of doors. But I am mad. You appreciate that, Goodrich, don’t you? You picked me up in a winter abbey….”

“Not you, Hornby. I picked up Marsden far away from here.”

Hornby grinned. “Marsden and I belong to a family of man incessantly seduced and fascinated by the nature of survival. Half-medical, half-military. There are also poets and magicians and religious guys, my dear Goodrich, in our family who sleep in ice and snow like Pavlov’s metaphysical dogs. Survivor hubris. Do you follow? Let me explain. I had no choice, Goodrich, as time went on (and I found myself despairing of expedition after expedition) but to become a loner. In that way I sought to bridge the distance between two legends—the famous Hornby and the obscure Hornby—the famous Marsden and all his dead mates. My mates were all dead too, you see. It was obscene in a sense to be alive. I would reproach myself—
Die
Hornby
die.
And I
understood
the anguish in a black man’s cry—
Burn
baby
burn.
Snow
lady
snow.
”
He glanced at the window now and I felt myself drawn back into his Arctic night as if we were steeped in
psychologies
written into forecasts of the weather. “Why, it’s easing up a bit, Goodrich,” he said to me. “A bloody miracle. Thank god for that. Let’s imagine, Goodrich,” he went on reminiscing as he waited for the snow to stop, “some namesake of yours stopping you in the street and saying to you—you’re
GODRICH
, aren’t you? Give all you possess to
me.
I am the poor. I have had no luck at the Pools. I am the poor. Give baby give. Pour Godrich pour.” He glanced at the window again. “Thank god it’s really easing up outside. A bloody miracle. Sometimes it’s really too much. They make too much snow up there. As I was saying, Goodrich. Fanaticism is glorious on the stage. Let down all the fake
wildernesses
and catastrophes you like. But I wouldn’t really dream of asking any Godrich (despite anything I may have said to the contrary) to surrender his last deadly farthing of ice…. Why, it’s stopped. It has really stopped snowing at last and I shall venture outside….”

The bastard of the sky drew him out into a glittering world beautiful beyond dreams. A whiteness of earth which seemed so intense it became a porous fabric of infinite darkness reaching into the sky. But, all of a sudden, a hundred yards or two from his cabin he realized he had been tricked and it was snowing again.

“I’ll get back,” he said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about. There it is … the light…. I put it there myself … in the window … in the face of my house. Let’s get there fast.”

He travelled a hundred yards or more and stopped. Where home was, where light in the face was, no light was, no house was.

“Extraordinary business,” Hornby said to the sky. “Where has it gone?”

“You tricked yourself,” the bastard of the sky replied. “You thought you saw a light….”

“I tell you it was here,” Hornby insisted.

“Re-trace your steps, Hornby. Come this way.”

Hornby agreed at last. “Now,” said Bastard Sky, “there it is.”

“Thank god,” said Hornby.

He began to make his way towards the light, his eyes glued upon it this time. But slipped. A patch of ice cracked under the snow. He was in, knee-deep.

If Sky had let him down, now it was Creek (Hornby Creek on the map) and he was aware of the great danger in which he stood. The freezing subterranean ice-cap of water had come over the top of his boot and there were two options open to him. He could try and gain the safety of his house though to all
appearances
with his eye unstuck, unglued from the light, it had vanished again into the sky. Or he could light a fire in the open without delay and endeavour to thaw his foot out, dry his boot out.

He was filled all at once with a sense of the callouses of infinity (the kiss of gloved hand upon booted foot), numb climax,
freezing
danger rolled into one enduring fabric as though Sky and Creek in deceiving him as reflections of many a dead mate or vanished expedition were ensnaring him into a revelation of the workshop of the gods….

He stood upon the very rim of ghostland—one collective foot already in the grave, one legendary cabin already in the sky. Thus as he began to ascend and descend Sky and Creek he became aware that there were two Hornbys projected from him into the cosmos. One was a man drawn out of the hat of millions, so steeped in extremity and danger beyond humanity’s lot as to become a private body in the stars, quintessential solitariness, Arctic legend of soul. The other was a man standing in the boot of millions so benumbed by humanity’s lot as to die unsung, unheralded, Arctic function of non-memory, non-soul.

Had he as private of space who had conquered the stars achieved his goal, or as the world’s forgotten boot computerized an infinite desolation and an infinite stairway into the ambiguous family of man? …

Harp ceased his vivid and enormous and unfinished recital of the discovery of a new world. He had evoked such an
unfathomable
and rich correspondence between us that I felt strangely lost, strangely bewildered and yet face to face with him across a fire on the other side of the globe. “I hope,” I said, and pleaded with him across that living fire which drew us together, “you will not burn your father’s papers into a stoical wilderness.”

Harp looked at me and I sensed the correspondence with Marsden’s sackcloth map which had been draped across a chair.

“There,” I said, stabbing the map with a finger, “is
Marsden
Creek.
Marsden’s legacy is everywhere.”

“Ah,” said Harp laughing a little, “have you not answered your own question? …”

*

“Mr. Goodrich, sir, Mr. Goodrich,” said Mrs. Glenwearie shaking Goodrich gently. Goodrich woke but for a moment or two could not tell where he was. Mrs. Glenwearie looked
distressed.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Goodrich dear, but you were crying out….”

“I thought … where is he?”

“Where is who?”

Goodrich passed a drowsy hand over his eyes. “Perhaps he doesn’t exist. Perhaps I only dreamt….”

Mrs. Glenwearie moved to a window and opened it wide to let some air in upon the lingering odour of tobacco. “Now, sir, I’ll get you a nice high tea in a little while, as soon as I’ve straightened the room a bit.” She tilted Harp’s cigarette ash into a tray.

“He
was
here,” said Goodrich.

“Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie gently. “I don’t understand half of the things you say. If it’s the wee gentleman in the long coat he left shortly after I got back from the butcher’s. I was very late today. And then you fell asleep for a bit.”

Goodrich laughed and tried to make a joke of things. “I need an early night,” he said, “after this afternoon’s session.”

“Doctor Marsden said not to leave supper this evening. What are your plans, sir?”

“Nothing for me, thank you, Mrs. Glenwearie. I do hope my visitors aren’t proving too much of a bother.”

“Oh no, Mr. Goodrich, don’t you worry over a thing. I manage very well. Mr. Knife is quite kind, you know. Sometimes he insists on washing up the dishes. And he’s a one for stories. He told me Doctor Marsden’s play may be in the Festival this year. I said I would go if it was.”

“Did he indeed?” said Goodrich. “I hope it may be.” He mimicked Marsden: “Plays cost a pretty penny.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Glenwearie. “Och, I remember as a young girl I did a bit of acting myself.” She looked both pleased and embarrassed.

“You’ve never told me that, Mrs. Glenwearie,” Goodrich said.

“Ah well, it wasn’t all that much. I was once Grace Darling and then again I was Haile Selassie in a church play.”

“Haile Selassie?” Goodrich was astounded. He stared at Mrs. Glenwearie, trying vainly to imagine the transformation.

“It was a long while back,” she told him. “And then I remember my mother being very proud when I was chosen to read Tam O’Shanter at a Burns Supper.”

Goodrich was fascinated. “Can you remember any of it now, Mrs. Glenwearie?” he asked.

“The whole lot,” said Mrs. Glenwearie astonishingly. “My favourite bit was:

She stopped, ash-tray in hand, her cheeks slightly reddened, and exclaimed apologetically, “I was quite swept away there, Mr. Goodrich. You’ll have to forgive me.”