Black Marsden (2 page)

Mrs. Glenwearie was my housekeeper. If I were to sum up her solid attributes (wholly opposite to the Gorgon fashion plate Doctor Marsden had dug up from the dive in London) seven words would suffice—a woman with a heart of gold. She was nearly sixty and in excellent health. She kept my large house scrupulously clean. I possessed three floors. The ground floor comprised a spacious sitting-room, a good-sized dining-room, a study, a rather large kitchen, bedroom and lavatory; the second floor was divided into four good-sized bedrooms and a large bathroom; the third floor made available a small sitting-room, bedroom and bath—Mrs. Glenwearie’s quarters.

Face to face with Mrs. Glenwearie one morning I was
fascinated
once more by an inventory of virtues, household virtues, hearth and home (all that money could buy). I was the luckiest of men I reasoned to get someone like her for forty pounds a month. Not only was I abnormally lucky in winning a
considerable
fortune from the Pools which gave me the key, as it were, to placate heaven and hell (by feeding many a poor angel and devil) but for a man without a family I possessed in Mrs. Glenwearie the nearest whole-hearted substitute nature could provide.

As I basked now in the glow of her temperament it seemed Marsden did not exist at all until Mrs. Glenwearie herself asked after him. The fact was she had seen him the evening he arrived like an ancient ghost from the Abbey. When I brought him to the house I thought I might keep him out of her sight. Or if she did see him make her think he was nothing but a fly-by-night beggar. But she had seen him again the very next morning large as life. Then, with the arrival of the Gorgon Spring she had been conscious of peculiar burgeonings in my part of the house.

Mrs. Glenwearie addressed me as “Mr. Goodrich”, “Mr. Goodrich dear” or “sir” as the fancy took her. (My name is Clive Goodrich.) She preserved a kind of sunny-faced acceptance of her “place” (as employee to employer) which, however, never blighted our relationship. (I am sure I had become not only her privileged ornament but a kind of adopted sou as well.) Nor did it lessen the shrewd labyrinth of conversation always at the edge of her tongue. I was greatly fascinated by this. A healthy
fascination
I supposed when I recalled another compulsion in my blood towards the Gorgon clothes horse of French fashion whose bars or open-ended frame Marsden had christened “skylight to eternity”.

“Oh Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “that woman is a flighty-looking one. Sailing about your house as if she owned it. She must have spent a pretty penny on her clothes. A bonnie Spring coat draped over her arm. And her dress fit for a Queen. A royal treat she is I’m sure.”

“But flighty-looking you think, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

“Aye, true enough. Flighty-looking she is,” said Mrs.
Glenwearie.
(Did she think “tart”, I wondered.) It was left to me to fit together
royal
treat
and
flighty-looking
and to wonder, in fact, how entangled was the moral with the aesthetic judgement. Did moral fascinations breed dangerous Queens or dangerous Queens moral fascinations?

“Did he take many pictures of her, Mr. Goodrich?”

“Did who take many pictures of whom, Mrs. Glenwearie?”

“That Doctor Marsden. I saw him take his flash-bulb camera from his room to the sitting-room. There came a flash through the half-open door and a minute or two later I saw another flash on the window to the street as I was on my way to the butcher’s up the road.”

“I didn’t see anything. I
hate
flash-bulb cameras,” I said suddenly as if Mrs. Glenwearie had touched a deeply embedded nerve-end of sensation (or the crippling of sensation) to which I rarely confessed within the chopping and changing lights of space. “It’s an allergy of sorts I suppose. Space allergy. Though I must confess I absolutely love the open sea and the sky. Storms, however, can do peculiar things to me. Makes me feel sometimes I’m in a faint tunnel with frozen lightning at the far end. It’s too ridiculous for words.” I was given to this kind of rambling absurd improvisation or confession to my housekeeper.

“It isn’t ridiculous at all, Mr. Goodrich dear. My late husband was a sufferer. He would glare at me and threaten to sneeze his head off if I dusted a carpet under his nose. You need to take greater care of yourself, sir. Sometimes I think you take too much on yourself, I do indeed. The oddsbodies you bring into the house at times. It fair unsettles you.”

“Abnormal luck calls for abnormal insurance, Mrs.
Glenwearie
. It’s better to pay than perish.”

“I confess I don’t understand a word of that, Mr. Goodrich. But, och, it’s not for me to say. I suppose you know your own business best.”

I lay in bed that night and turned over in my mind my
conversation
with Mrs. Glenwearie. She said she had seen Doctor Marsden take his flash-bulb camera into the sitting-room. I had no recollection of this. Mrs. Glenwearie had seen it. She said categorically she had seen it. Actually set eyes on it. I repeated the words like dogma. Dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A secret doubt began to sprout in my mind.

With a snap of the fingers, so to speak, judges had sent
innocent
men to the gallows on dogmatic circumstantial evidence. A strange light now shone down the longest tunnel on earth in my mind as I put the pieces together and recalled how Marsden had snapped his fingers at me and the curious hypnotic sensation which enveloped me then like a blow falling on the back of my neck.

One sees and still does not see, feels and still does not feel. I should have questioned Mrs. Glenwearie more closely. Did she know or recall the exact time she had seen Marsden with his camera? She had intimated in our conversation that it was around the time she set out for the butcher’s. Now as a rule this happened in the mornings. But I had known her on occasions to go in the afternoons.

Half-waking, half-sleeping questions robed in abstract
concreteness
or concrete abstractness (it was difficult to tell which) began to plague my mind. Who or what was this camera? Was it Marsden himself she had seen straddling the corridor? Had he made himself invisible within mental items of furniture she took for granted? (A newspaper column I had read some time back floated into consciousness; a “white” woman made herself
invisible
by playing “black” in an American economic theatre: real life rather than fiction. And then the right-handed real world to which she belonged (or with which she still secretly identified) saw her as a left-handed unreal chair to sit upon—or left-handed door to knock upon—mental cross-lateral furniture. In crossing and re-crossing an economic racial or religious or political divide (right to left, left to right) one could draw down upon oneself the implacable biases of cross-lateral reification or malfunction. And the old adage—
never
let
your
right
hand
know
what
your
left
hand
is
doing
—became either a revelation of sinister complacency or a distorted cue intimating a sleeping ambidextrous Queen (uniquely gifted, not double-dealing or slippery) in the casket or camera of community. How amazingly involuted and truly impressionistic, truly expressionistic are the sovereign phantoms on the borders of sleep.)

Perhaps therefore my question about Mrs. Glenwearie’s camera—I pursued the theme obsessively—was less absurd than it appeared at first sight. When one is involved in the most serious game of dual responsibility one has played since the dawn of mankind (a prisoner on trial for a nightmare body of wealth he has accumulated) one will summon as witnesses all territories of waking and dreaming life as part and parcel of the exercises of judgement.

Marsden was a superb ritual conjurer. The day I stumbled upon him in the ruined Dunfermline Abbey he had played on me one of his divine cross-lateral jokes (left-hand telepathy) by invoking knives and quills and a harp which seemed to crowd upon him like an angelic and satanic chorus combined. Later I had been told of Walking Knife and Harp as real persons I would soon meet—his right-hand associates.

I opened my eyes suddenly to a jarring noise in the room but looking around saw no one: a faint premonitory rumble seemed to run through my limbs or through the building and then I heard distinctly (or felt absurdly) the drone of a passing aircraft I dreamt belonged to me like a sky-yacht in space.

My house was in a particularly quiet section of Edinburgh and at nights I enjoyed the stillness immensely as if I were in the heart of a charmed countryside. Thus every whisper of wood accentuated the muffled tread of time as though silence were the art of wrestling with invisible presences.

The room was dark. The darkness was accentuated by the fact that I had not drawn the curtains across the window which gleamed now with the light of the moon. I could see in my mind’s eye a clear sky over the city strewn with faint stars around the disc of the moon and as I visualized this I dreamt afresh of late afternoon and early evening walks and the
conjunction
I felt then of open sky and sea. The open sky delighted me. As much for its dreaming openness as for contrasting weathers and moods in which it steeped me from time to time. It sustained a divine rule or play of elements—hour to hour, day to day—in which the Castle over Princes Street symbolized a human and therefore man-made mist or legendary establishment.

The open sea delighted me. I could hear the cry of the gulls as I descended towards the Firth of Forth….

A rectangle of light at the end of the room or road (was it sea or sky?) insinuated itself into my dreams. Doctor Marsden had come in dressed as a Camera with a collection plate he deposited on the bedroom floor. I was struck by his great dignity and decorum: persona or camera fitted him well. At the same time I could not resist being almost overwhelmed by a sensation of weird and indefatigable humour beneath the black cloth or flesh he wore.

“Call me Camera,” he said familiarly adjusting his wig of cloth. “Cloth of hair.”

His head in the half-dark, half-light of the room was smooth on all sides—eyeless cloth, mouthless cloth, earless cloth,
noseless
cloth.

“Call me Camera,” he said again jocularly pointing to a rectangle of moon or sea or sky he had now incorporated upon brow and eyes. “It cost a pretty penny this outfit.” He slid along the floor. “Embroidery of stars and haircloth. A pretty penny.” He came still nearer, his voice half-sinister, half-wheedling. “Penny for the Guy,” he said. “Penny for the Guy.”

I proceeded without further prompting to lay out a pound, a dollar note, a franc, a pre-Columbian bone and a shell. Marsden put these on his plate as if they were the relish of his soul. “What a collection,” he said. “The Church like the Poor like Art is always with us. Give well and you give wisely.”

I nodded. “Now,” he continued, “you will clap Knife and you will clap Jennifer Gorgon. A sweet name is Jennifer.” He clapped his hands as he spoke and quoted Robert Burns:

He clapped his hands again beneath the cloth of his flesh—clapping a hidden church or choir or theatre he carried around in his lusty camera. I saw now as he clapped that Knife, sharp as bone or sin, had stepped forth from him. And that Jennifer too had stepped forth from him naked as a sea-shell.

In the darkened church or bedroom she seemed to absorb much of the radiance from Marsden’s rectangular window or brow and in her desire to absorb this more completely, had pulled her nightdress over her head but been unable to free herself entirely from it, so that her mouth and nose were
extinguished
in a featureless robe and bundle, and her breasts shone beneath, sagged a little, darkened a little into large bruised eyes and nipples.

I felt cheated by those blind counterfeit eyes of hers (
half-falling
, half-uplifted from her body) but fascinated and astonished as well that such a shell or woman—so fragile and lovely she seemed now—possessed such sculptured breasts into which were set such huge coins or currency of beauty.
Currency
of
rage.
Rage indeed. If those coins were to strike the floor they would ring with fury at the manifest way their owner had been entangled in a spell or net cast by Black Marsden’s ritual camera.

All of a sudden, at the very edge of fascination, Knife slashed the camera, and Marsden stood stark naked. I was engulfed by a feeling of impropriety. But, incredibly, impropriety was erased in the avuncular way he appraised Gorgon like a doctor a patient. Naked doctor. Naked breasts of patient. Then he touched her nipples and my original suspicions returned.

“It’s all right,” he said calmly. “Nothing sexual, believe me. Pennies on dead men’s eyes as far as I am concerned. We live in a penny-wise, pound-foolish age.” He still touched her as he spoke. “We make a fuss about moral pence when millions of mortal lives are cheap.”

“This is outrageous,” I cried stung and ashamed. “There you stand … stark naked … blatantly … naked.”

“Naked propriety,” said Black Marsden. “I am inventing a new style for both pulpit and theatre. She is our divided
enchantress
. Moral pence in church or bedroom. And a million dirt-cheap in the theatre of the world. We have created an ambiguity. And out of that ambiguity is born the Knife of humanity. Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Goodrich woke with the dream fresh in his mind. So fresh it seemed to saturate the world outside with a curious precipitation of melancholy. A dispersing melancholy lay on the trees across the garden in the distance. A darker but more intimate pride and spirit suffused the wood of the trees into which the young leaves seemed to retire like fossils of autumn rather than cradled summer.

He sat at a small table near the window, sipped a cup of tea and ate a biscuit from the tray Mrs. Glenwearie had put there. Curious, he thought (as he looked out across the garden into the misty sky) how the passing seasons were saturated by one’s dreams and turn into half-fossil, half-cradle—endless deceiving, revealing subjective/objective fabric or open-ended bias. He wrote in his diary: “Open-ended ironical flesh of nature or fabric of things into axe; open-ended ironical fabric of things or flesh of nature into scythe; open-ended ironical tunnel of mist into a shield for an assassin.”

As the mist upon the trees began to disperse into letters of space which seemed to match or mock his reflections, he
suddenly
felt a cleavage of mood—a cleavage within the desolating fabric of dreams.

“The memory of Knife was oppressive when I awoke: I remember how he slashed Marsden’s cloth or camera. Now I feel a sense of relief.”

He poured himself another cup of tea, stared into it
unseeingly.
“Naked bias,” he wrote pulling his dressing-gown more closely around his limbs. “What is freedom without the blackest self-mockery—without intense creativity and care—without
seasonal
dress and undress and the unravelling of self-portraits and self-deceptions?”

He stared at the naked pages of infinity—so his diary seemed to him sometimes like a hidden blackboard in yesteryear’s snow, paradoxical
tabula
rasa.
Each morning he endeavoured to make some sort of entry. Sometimes it was a record of the previous day’s activities or a reflection on the past night’s dreams which he wrote with a stubborn left hand or impish right. As he sorted out the loose pages now they seemed to him not quite in the order in which he had put them a day or two ago. Perhaps it was his imagination. Or on the other hand—had someone slipped into his room and read his private diaries? He began now to make a new and perverse entry.

Knife arrived later that morning. Goodrich had not really believed he existed as flesh-and-blood until the actual moment he set eyes upon him and the polished sitting-room in
Edinburgh,
clean as a die, shone with the intensity of a mirror or a glass of living water speckled with stars. Knife’s face was
reflected
there within a swarm of buzzing flies under a glaring sun. “Why,” said Goodrich, half-hypnotized by constellations of memory, “we have met before. Three years ago wasn’t it? In Kingston, Jamaica.”

Black Marsden gave a drunken chuckle as if to confirm a base pollution on one hand, a magical potency on the other in the elements. He sat in a large red upholstered armchair, his black beard wild. Wild and trim as the fierce liquid at his elbow which looked amber in one light transparent in another.

The mist outside had vanished. A low fire burned under a ridge of coal at the far end of the sitting-room and a pale shaft crossed swords with it. Black Marsden snapped his fingers as if to aid and abet the Goodrich/Knife duel of memory. In his plush armchair he looked every inch the Director of Tabula Rasa Global Theatre. Goodrich half-laughed, half-protested, but sank nevertheless into a hypnotic scene (hang-dog or hanged man tunnel) as he wrestled inwardly with Knife afresh….

He made doodles of butter punctuated by diamonds and flies. The suffocating heat of Kingston sliced him in half. He recalled the day he arrived there on his first round-the-world trip. He recalled being besieged by beggars. A crowd of faces (grown-up faces, children’s faces) pressed upon him. With the left hand of a dreamer in broad daylight he was intent on drawing them upon the pages of infinity in his book. The covers of that book were his own paradoxical frame of mind and body related to seasons and places. Soon it became too oppressive for him to complete the sketches he had begun. They dangled at his fingertips nevertheless—decapitated, armless sketches—blackboard or blackbeard buried in today’s sun or yesteryear’s snow.

He dived into a restaurant and ordered a cold beer. The crowd outside had been overcome and buried for the time being but its sketched reality—its hang-dog or hanged man face—rose up before him within Knife who had followed him into the
restaurant
and stood by the door like conscience itself ready to steal, ready to kill: features pitted like a beehive into which miraculously the army of flies on the street had crawled and vanished. Knife hesitated at the door, then having made up his mind went straight to Goodrich’s table and laid a folded piece of paper upon it in order to levy a charge for the beggars he had consumed with a stroke of the pen, so to speak: Beehive Knife, Goodrich thought reflecting on his unfinished sketches.

He unfolded the paper, flattened it out and read the following: “Dear patron, I am the father of many children. I cannot find work. Unemployment is higher than it has ever been. I beg. I am ashamed to speak to you and ask for help. Please help me. I will stand here at the door and you can pass something to me as you go out. Don’t say a word, just give me whatever you can.”

He took a dollar from his pocket, folded it into the man’s letter and slipped dollar and letter under a bowl on the table. He raised his glass to his lips. A faint shadow snaked towards him and before he could say “Jack Robinson” the dollar bill and circular letter levitated from the table and vanished with Knife into the street….

*

“You are mistaken,” said Knife. It was the first time he had spoken after what seemed a long pause in the Edinburgh
sitting-room.
“I have never been to Jamaica.”

“You have never been to Jamaica …” Goodrich began in astonishment.

“Never.” Knife sat back in his chair beside Marsden. It was a similar chair and belonged to a rich suite—divan and
armchairs.
Goodrich sat on the divan. Black Marsden chuckled and sipped his whisky with a disconcerting wry flicker of a smile on his lips. Goodrich wondered
was
Marsden
drunk
?
And he was stricken by a certain thought but ashamed of it immediately—the feeling or thought that Marsden would never scruple to slip into his bedroom and read the contents of his private diaries. That morning the pages had seemed to be somewhat out of order as if someone had cleverly ransacked them but slipped up somewhere along the line….

“Why of course … of course …,” he cried to Knife (trying to blot out or stifle his suspicions of Marsden), “the man I saw was black. And yet I could have sworn when I first set eyes on you…. I remember sketching him in my diary as Beehive Knife. His face was all pitted … a graveyard … a beehive. It seems an incongruous comparison. But there it is. That’s how he seemed to me. And I don’t really mean that you look like that. God forbid. You are quite elegant in fact. I must confess I cannot account for the resemblance between him and you….”

“All elegance,” said Black Marsden drunkenly, “is a pit of fashion under big brother devil or big beggar god or big trader devil god. There are affluent actors or beggars in affluent societies to play poor beggars acting out poor societies. What an apotheosis of elegance is involved in such a transformation or translation of techniques. I am sure Knife appreciates with tongue in cheek of course (how else?) the new suit on his back which you have given to him, Goodrich. And the shoes too.”

Knife’s white face remained expressionless. He was tastefully dressed in a lounge suit of greyish or brownish material and in sharp boots of Japanese circulation. “Yes,” said Knife seeing Goodrich’s eyes on his boots. “They came from America to Regent Street, London, but were made in Japan.”

“Apparition of poverty,” said Black Marsden cryptically.

“Poverty?” Goodrich was bewildered. “Aren’t they among the richest societies on earth?”

“Quite so. But we need riches to make Knife play poor beggar elegantly and well. He must achieve a marvellous apotheosis. Bless the rich man for the crumbs from his table! Bless the poor man for the opportunity and role of a lifetime! I want Knife to play poor beggar as if he embodies the storehouse of the devil. Not only crumbs but exceptional blood and talent. Not only crumbs but fantastic masks and costumes. Fabrics from all over the world. We may need to open a few graves. And that costs money. A silken thread of blood here, a wasted bone or button there. A shoe-string of muscle worth a fortune elsewhere. Even a fly or two that may cost a diamond or two. Think of the glue in his eyes.”

“Mardie, Mardie,” said Jennifer coming into the room
suddenly.
“You know you shouldn’t drink at this time of the day.” She came in with a large tray of sandwiches. “Mrs. Glenwearie is a dear.” She deposited the tray on a table; then with the facility of an expert at bridge flicked plates and napkins towards the men in the room. Each plate had dwarf insignia—a
crucifixion,
a knight, a king, a queen, jack of spades, diamonds, hearts etc. “There’s chicken and cheese and tomato and
cucumber.
And ham I think. Yes, delicious.” There was a knock at the door and Mrs. Glenwearie appeared with coffee which Jennifer took from her and deposited on an extra table in the room. Soon they were eating Mrs. Glenwearie’s sandwiches and drinking Mrs. Glenwearie’s coffee.

Jennifer was dressed in another French tunnel. But this one made him realize how wide and shapely her hips were. She had seemed to Goodrich slim even fragile before. He glanced without appearing to look at the upper half of her body and recalled his dream of her breasts into which were set large beautiful coins. She passed him a cup of coffee and their hands touched.

“When you came into the room, Jennifer,” said Black
Marsden,
“we were discussing Knife’s role as poor beggar in my global production. It’s high time we review the whole matter from as many sides as possible. Goodrich has been a great help. He is a patron of vision….”

I looked bewildered. “Oh yes,” he said, “the way you
recognized
and identified Knife.”

“Recognized? Identified? Not at all. I made an error.”

“A very evocative error.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mardie likes you, Clive,” said Jennifer, “for your scarecrow eye. He thinks you are one of us.”

“One of you? Scarecrow eye?”

“Yes,” said Marsden, “in raising issues of memory and
non-memory
….”

“I confess I am out of my depth.”

“How marvellous,” said Jennifer, “to swim—to be out of one’s depth.”