He brought her back safely to New Forest and I made her acquaintance for the first time. First time? There was no first time, second time, first dance, second dance. We were ageless dream. I knew her, she knew me, it seemed, long before Masters arrived with her in the Town in 1939. When and where we had met puzzled the will at the edge of waking spirit but we were clothed in the sun’s originality as in a book we knew whose chapters overlapped, past shadows lengthened into the future, the future condensed itself in the present. I saw the originality of the sun in her eyes, she saw it in mine. She was a window for me into light. I knew I had been with her in the voyage to Waterfall Oracle. When I told Masters this he smiled at me. I was a child. I was entitled to a child’s game, a child’s intuition. I was entitled to the seed of dream. He knew — even as he smiled — that I would never relinquish it and that it would mature over the years into a recovery of Waterfall Oracle. He would turn into my guide. He would turn into the dead king. Amaryllis and I would be his living companions. He would leave us at some stage but by then we would be launched on our journey to innocence and guilt in this age or the next or still the next.
In 1939 his statement to the press — that Amaryllis pinned into Purgatory’s Who’s Who — was a bald recital of fact and it was to take me all his life up to and beyond the day of his second death to glean a perception of the prophecies he had received as a young man in Waterfall Oracle. Those visions or utterances so staggered him, so overturned him, that he could only impart them to me by indirections and through a variety of phases that were all, in a sense, incomplete. The first phase I tended to call that of Masters the First (1917–57) though in substance and reality this phase possessed sub-systems that ran roughly from 1917–39, 1939–57. (Indeed all subsequent phases were subject to sub-systems.) The second phase I tend to see as running loosely from 1957 into the 1970s. The third phase I tend to see as coming to a close on the day he died in London in 1982. Masters the Fourth commenced then on the day he died and became my guide backward in time.
It was Masters the First (a young man of twenty-two) who consoled me and took charge of my poor mother when he returned to New Forest on the eve of my father’s Carnival funeral. (That funeral was the most outstanding event or masquerade in New Forest for decades.) My mother was stationed next door at a window in the top storey of Masters’ house. Our house — the one in which the Masters family had lived in the 1920s — was single-storeyed, three cave-bedrooms, kitchen, shower-bath cave, lavatory, drawing room cave, front gallery cave overlooking the garden and the long central aisle or pathway through flowering plants to the street.
Thus, at a stroke, as it were, my mother was removed from the funeral stage itself yet ensconced in a high balcony next door as in a theatre. There, locked into a frame, with two servants to keep her company and to prevent her from escaping, she beheld the procession beneath.
I remember glancing up at her from the aisle in the garden along which the funeral audience — the New Forest citizenry — was arriving. Bodies moved in single file into the house, past the wreaths and the show-piece of a coffin, and out again into the street where they stood in slightly tense, somnolent, pleased, passive groups or repaired to sit in their carriages and cars and wait for the coffin to be borne from the house to the hearse and the procession to come alive and take its course to the cemetery. A thrill ran down my spine on seeing my mother far up in her frame. It was not simply her expression but the sensation I had, as I dreamt of her, that rain was falling in the air over the window. It was an illusion, for the sun was sharp and bright and not a drop fell upon me below. But the sensation persisted that my mother was veiled by Waterfall Oracle, by some extraordinary ruse of the light years wheeling in space, by some veil or abstract premise Masters had brought back with him from his expedition upon the river El Dorado.
It is said that a newborn child, with the gift of a seer, sometimes wears a caul over its eyes, and now it seemed that my new-dead father had projected a caul over Jennifer’s eyes through which she looked at me (as if two eyes were raised into a single third eye) — looked at me as if I were her judge and executioner rolled into one around the wheeling years.
I judged her, yes, but she resisted me in that sudden caul of rain. She was a prophetess, the Delphic oracle of slain queen, though not a sound issued as yet from her lips.
Funerals are the most important social event in the New Forest calendar. It was an unforgivable offence if relatives of the deceased failed to attend. Such relatives were but a trickle, however, in a river of mourners drawn from the distant relations of less distant relations of close relatives of the deceased. Then there were the friends of the deceased and the friends of friends of the friends of the deceased. Then there were acquaintances of acquaintances of the acquaintances of the deceased. Then there were colleagues of the deceased and the friends of colleagues and the friends of the friends of colleagues of the deceased. Lastly, as if to defy all convention, there came the curious, and the friends of the curious, and the acquaintances of the friends of the curious who haunted the premises of Carnival.
In my father’s case, despite the universal hostility he had aroused in his conscientious defence of a pagan prince and a savage, all barriers were broken when fate struck — as if by accident — to punish him. The community flocked to him then, not as a free people but in a phantom concourse of solid souls bound for a. racecourse, or a football match, propelled by a devil to mount a gigantic treadmill upon which, it seemed, everybody that was anybody, nobody that was somebody, moved to pay their respects to the shell robed in a coffin in the professional vestments of the advocate.
A reporter stood at the gate and entered the names of important persons attending the funeral. The Governor had asked Masters to represent him. There were representatives of the legal profession, the medical profession, the Church, Sport, Scholarship, Politics, the Prisons, the Estates. The men wore black serge suits, white shirts, black ties. The women wore white dresses and white or black hats. Masters wore black as well but he had had no time to have it dry-cleaned and it was painted with faintly discernible stars like the flame of a match from the El Dorado river. I saw them if no one else did. Even as no one, in the dream, looking up to the frame in which my mother stood, saw the glisten of tears, the glisten of rain.
By degrees, the passive funeral throng acquired a faintly unsettled mould. The lid was fastened upon the coffin. Masters and five other citizens of Purgatory; namely, a lawyer, a doctor, and three Old Boys from College, bore the coffin through the garden into the roadway and toward the hearse. The horse, for some unaccountable reason, took fright and the bearers were driven to deposit the coffin upon the grass verge by the roadside. The horse reared as the mule or donkey had reared to overshadow Martin when he fell under the wheel of the dray-cart. It not only reared but succeeded in backing the hearse on to the parapet. It drew so close to the garden that I dreamt it extended its neck like a harlequin, Carnival giraffe and cropped the sunflowers in the garden to leave the stage under the faint mist of Waterfall Oracle dry and shorn.
The driver of the hearse succeeded at last in calming the frightened phantom-rock of an animal and in restoring the hearse to the roadway. Masters and his fellow bearers lifted the coffin again. They succeeded this time in transporting it to the hearse and depositing it therein. Wreaths were piled upon the coffin; they gleamed through the glass body of the vehicle that had escaped fracture. The horse was frightfully motionless and its panting (however still), perspiring (however dry) sides also gleamed. It was a dappled rock of a creature and its coloration seemed to reflect the garden sun-fodder it had consumed. I wondered whether the glass vehicle had also eaten the wreaths piled upon the coffin within it or whether my father actually lay in the body of the horse with the sunflowers from the garden that the rock-animal had consumed sprouting from him.