At last the phantom horse responded to the driver. The driver was attired in a long threadbare feathery cloak. Not a feather from a duck’s back but a feather that had drifted down from the sun-raven that flew with the duck through the mist over my mother’s eyes. It was black. The procession moved inch by inch, it seemed, under the yellow sunflower yet black sun-raven in the body of space.
The procession moved through East Street, Orange Promenade, into Brickdam. The passivity of the procession — the passivity of the audience sealed into their slowly moving carriages and cars — was possessed now of the faintest rumbling. Not thunder, but the agitated digestion of the rock-phantom horse that led the long line of vehicles towards the cemetery. It was at least a mile long. Masters sat with me in the principal mourners’ carriage. We may have been sailing upon the bed of a river sucked dry and in which the prospect of fluid evolutionary/revolutionary soul existed in the inhabitants of the Town who lined the route of the procession.
There they were with curious waiting gaze as if rooted in a spell within the phantom horse in which I was convinced my father lay. They too had been cropped by that gigantic creature. They too were subject to drought-stage, drought-garden, in Purgatory’s belly. Had not Masters read to me — on one occasion when he visited my parents — the story of the Trojan Horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame? So now, it seemed to me, a colonial regime, such as poverty-stricken New Forest, secreted in itself the stratagem of Purgatory within its rock-horse that had cropped my garden, and that therein lay the catalyst of modern allegory, modern fiction or biography of terrifying spirit to judge the age in which I lived.
Fly, sunflower, star, feather, crocodile, cannon — to list a few spectres that haunted the route of the procession — were mutual catalysts on the Delphic blackboard of space outside my window and they rumbled in the digestive organs of phantom Carnival daemon or horse.
In running along tarred Brickdam at slow-motion cosmic pace (that recalled the game of the crab that Masters had played on the Arawak foreshore), the hooves of the horse bit into the road soft and hard. They were acquainted with the pitch of night melting in the sun. They were acquainted with the heights and the depths. Daylight night, night-time sun, rumbled in the belly of the horse. We gained the Alms House and I was aware of plucked scouts, the feathered police, their plumes waving as they held the traffic in tributary side streets to allow the procession to pass. We passed the gateway through which Thomas had been knighted by Aunt Alice. The garden theatre in which she had danced was as dry as East Street river. The Bartleby dancing school was finished. Finished? Clean slate? Not really. A wisp of paper blew through the gate and floated into my carriage window. White paper. Black slate. It had been crunched by the horse and the teeth marks listed a throng of hopes, desires, biases as dark as midnight pitch; so deceptive and dark is the pitch of slate crunched by the daemon horse that it seems angelic material, clean slate, the purity of existence, whereas it is the litter of hidden injustice that plagues the human imagination.
I remembered Aunt Alice’s Magna Carta limbs and wondered what archaic revolution she would achieve when she leapt from the belly of Purgatory’s horse into the kingdom of the sun.
We sailed past the Alms House and came to the College. No sign of Quabbas or young Alice or Becks or Delph. They were hidden in the slate that had been crunched by the horse. We sailed on Brickdam river to the New Forest race course and turned right. This was the last leg of the journey to the cemetery. I descended with Masters from the principal mourners’ carriage but the labyrinthine sensation of having been cropped by the Carnival horse possessed my bones, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave I felt neither I nor my father was in it. He belonged to the past, it was true, I to the future, but I felt neither his death in the past nor mine — whenever it came in the future — had absolutely occurred or would absolutely occur. He had been — I would be — framed to appear non-existent. But the fact was we resided in the womb of the phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution more enduring than novel or fashionable non-existences that perpetuate a lie.
His coffin was his frame — dray-cart wheel lashed into hollow trunk of a tree in which an apparition resembling himself had been sealed — and the robed shell of a creature lying there was desolation’s fiend masquerading as the masked parent, the masked advocate, I once knew.
*
My father’s death left an indelible scar on my mother’s breasts and heart. It coincided with the beginning of the cancer from which she died in the early 1940s. Masters became my foster-father. And yet I felt parentless when Martin became an ape of soul dressed in bleached snow in the trunk of a tree that served as his epitaph and coffin. How else may I describe the shock of incredulity, of incredible parting from someone of whom I had been jealous when he lay in bed with my mother and yet upon whom I had come to rely as if he were a god?
Such parentless eventuality is the origin of the paradoxes in this book on which I have been engaged for twenty-five years and more. For instance, Masters was my foster-father over the years following my father’s death, yet I became his fiction-parent — and the fiction-parent of Thomas and other characters — in embarking upon a biography of spirit in them, through them, overshadowing them all. I grew by involuntary stages to appreciate the significance of the “mask of the cuckold” that he (Masters) identified with his legal father through whom, in fact, his survival in his mother’s glass womb was assured when she contemplated Abortion and he protected her and her unborn child by another man.
GLASS BODY. PHANTOM HORSE.
The conjunction arose in my mind intuitively, secretively, like the seed of opera or symphony one Easter Friday when Masters, Amaryllis and I visited the Portuguese Cathedral in Main Street, New Forest.
It was the year after my father’s funeral. The Portuguese were renowned for the Carnival theatre they staged at Easter. The Good Friday Christ was nailed into, then taken from, the cross. The painted blood on his hands and feet, and in his side, seemed astonishingly real. I was struck, however, less by painted blood than by the gloom and shadow, the radiance and dazzle, of glass windows arching up to the roof of the world. I was in the mutuality of the divine, I was in mother-horse, I was in father-glass, father-horse, mother-glass, I ascended, descended, into a mysterious constellation of evolutionary spaces.
Amaryllis was a Catholic by upbringing and it was through her, I believe, that Masters thought of taking us to the Easter Carnival Mass. I dreamt she was covered with autumn leaves within the phantom horse of the glass-cathedral. Was it a good or a bad omen that the rain of leaves covering her had been cropped by space? We were in the same broad church, the same narrow boat, the same vicarious coffin, the same ultimate cradle, and the digestive rumbling organs of space enlivened, rather than extinguished, the fire of her spirit. I did not see her again until 1957 when I came to London. Masters arranged her passage to England from South America in 1940 and there were rumours that the vessel in which she sailed had been torpedoed by a German submarine and that the sea was strewn by leaves and feathers (akin to fish and scales and stars) of oceanic tree or epitaph. My dream-premonition come true! But the rumours were false. We met in the year Masters and I arrived in England and were married in 1959 at the Registry Office in Kensington.