I laughed. Alice laughed. The comedy of an invisible ring, an invisible barrel, an invisible fortune. And yet the tragedy … In 1961 when the sea cracked without warning and closed over my mother’s hair that fell like lightning to her waist (she was an excellent swimmer and no one at first believed she had drowned) I was left without a blind penny. The house had to be sold to pay off her debts. I remember my Aunt Miriam saying in one of her plays, ‘Your mother is extravagant, Robin. Your grandfather left her a treasure. Come and live with me before the world ends.’ Was she speaking to me or to W. H.? I went to live with her for a spell on my way to Skull but the house was empty, always empty — she resided now in the waves — and the shadow of W. H. dogged her footsteps as he sought to revive her theatre in the magic wood. They had been close friends, perhaps lovers, and he knew her well. She was sensuous and practical. Sensuous in her deeply grained imagination. Practical in her wit. ‘Accept the day-to-day calendar of doom, doom,’ she said like a housewife scribbling a list on her pad, ‘it’s a style the calypso invented for the BBC and all the grand newspapers. They never acknowledge their debt but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’ The word debt pricked me and I half-awoke to Alice’s carelessness and extravagance. Why had I not pawned the invisible ring I wore and raised the money to save our old home from the depredations of strangers?
Too late! Such magical security born of the Ghosts of the sea and the sky comes too late. Too late to save an old house or a lost kingdom.
Lost? Is anything ever absolutely lost? May one not find one’s ancestral treasure again by the light, the spirit, the self-mocking humour of vulnerable humanity, self-mocking yet self-revealing visionary touch?
A paradoxical marriage or contract or rehearsal of the origins of tradition runs through all bawdy and sacred generations, the living, the dead, the unborn, to activate the glories of the present and the past and to imply that the body of the resurrection is a medium of ceaseless rapport between original deprivation and original mystery, between newfound being and insensible being, between the tender apparition of hope and derelict, institutional trappings, between past, present and future time and timeless comedies of time.
Between birthday ghosts and old age.
‘Come,’ Alice and Miriam are saying to me, ‘now that you have touched the ring it is time to celebrate your birthday as if it is a royal event. The world shakes with violence. We live in chapels perilous at the bottom of the sea that we must taste like a piece of cake, on the flatlands, in the valleys, on the mountains, on the moon, and in sight of the masquerade of long-haired Halley’s comet that we must taste right royally. Here are the origins of the games that children play.’
They hold me and lead me to cosmic theatre in the magic wood. We walk on the crest of the sea and the waves leap and jump and make rain. We are on our way to celebrate my fifth boomsday birthday on a fading dusty calendar. A relic of a newspaper blows at our feet. September 1950 turns to mould in June 1961. The paper twists into spray April 1986 and the apparition of Birthday Ghost. I touch my ring and taste the wreck of civilizations.
164 BC Birthday Ghost is Babylonian cake. 12 BC Birthday Ghost is Chinese and Roman cake. AD 66 Birthday Ghost is broadsword cake over Jerusalem. AD 295 Birthday Ghost ices the constellation of Andromeda. AD 451 Birthday Ghost adorns Attila the Hun. AD 684 Birthday Ghost ices a Nürnberg Tiger. AD 1066 Birthday Ghost divides William and Harold. AD 1910 Birthday Ghost submits to photographers. AD 1985–6 Birthday Ghost dresses up for many a party around the globe.
‘Taste it,’ said Alice. ‘Taste a comet and live. Taste the ridiculous fantasies that are the seed nevertheless of history and tragedy. Taste illusion. Taste everything that mirrors childhood and old age. Taste until it hurts, it enlightens, it revives a nebulosity of spirit, the nebulous contract with an apparently doomed humanity ingrained into life. That is your royal birthday Robin Redbreast Glass. The merriment of the lost … What does it mean?’
I was filled with amazement that such a question had been directed at me. Was I a king or a prince in disguise? Alice seemed so close. Alice, the queen in Miriam’s play, is speaking now. She spoke now, she speaks now in a wave, she will speak now in a wave.
‘Now is never,’ Alice says. ‘Now is forever. Now is old age. Now is infancy. Now is Rome. Now is Athens. Now is Babylon. Now is Byzantium. Now is Number Ten. Now is the Kremlin. Now is the White House and a black band playing the blues. Now is the flight of the swallow from summer to winter and back. Now is this precious day in which we live or in which we die.’ She is laughing at me. I know she is laughing at me. Alice is laughing at me. And the merry waves jump and subside at our feet under a sea wall.
Her laughter is close and merry, I feel the bite of a wave, I feel bitten by laughter. Does one bite the flesh of a wave when one drowns, when one is borne by the sharp tooth of merriment through death?
What are the origins of such merriment? What are the origins of such bitten/biting laughter, such laughter at death or through death?
It is a game we play in the chapel perilous under the sea at Aunt Miriam’s parties. The children dress as rocks, as waves, as moss, as fish, as birds.
I bite into the premises of laughter. I chew the laughing fish and pause in mid-air as if I stand on a balloon in an animal’s lung. Boomsday comet or balloon, boomsday lung, boomsday love affair with the pretty girls dressed as fish. Shall I dive into the heart of the balloon and sing, make faces at the chorusing birds? Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
‘Come, come Robin,’ Aunt Miriam says. ‘It’s your turn to play. Such a rich costume. Such a glorious balloon.’
I stand awkwardly on the stage. Perhaps I was the envy of the other children. Perhaps — on the other hand — I envied them, I envied the part they were about to play. Aunt Miriam had rigged up a sheet and a blanket as a curtain behind which we stood, Alice and I. Aunt Miriam gave a jerk and the curtain rose like a cloud from the sky. There was a shout and the children swarmed upon us. Fish, animate rocks, birds, animate moss, all came. Indiscriminate laughter. I reached for Alice and she had gone under the wave. I saw her far down in the sea beneath the sheet and the waving blanket, beneath the merry children whose empty graves — untenanted still — are marked with crosses in the sacred wood. I saw the fish dive for her as I dived into my balloon of space. Nothing united us but the tooth of death we shared with all creatures. Nothing now. I nibbled at a bird in the sky. I nibbled at myself. The fish stroked her, the fish stroked itself, the fish stroked Miriam. How sharp, how bitter, is the merry stroke of death at the heart of self-love that cracks at last into the mysterious reflection of others? How sweet, how bitter, is life, the gravity of heart-rending compassion in life? We must laugh with one another or die. We must laugh at our own incompleteness, our grotesqueries, our absurdities, our fallacies, our proneness to despair, our innermost corruption, our innermost violence.
The biter bitten is the tooth of infinite rehearsals of chapels perilous, of the children in Alice’s and Miriam’s arms under the sea.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
SIX
I was wakened by voices I could not fathom. Were they human, were they other than human? I felt an irrational shock that my college education was over. It was a blow. I felt the hollowness of the humanity to which I returned. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Why had she drowned? The afternoon had been blissful. She had taken our boat Tiger to sea and we were drifting lazily a mile or two off the coast. Such trips were not unusual. This was the third excursion in June 1961. Aunt Miriam was there. Five children were there including Peter and Emma, two close friends of my own age, orphaned in early childhood, who lived with Alice and me. I was there. (No! I am confused. I would have been there but was down with flu and lay in bed at Aunt Miriam’s. W. H. insists that it was he who lay in bed with flu and has another tale to tell that I shall disclose in due course.)