The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) by Wilson Harris Page B

rich—however dubiously wealthy—whereas the other, the respectable saleswoman, was destitute? But that was too outrageous to be tragic. It lay beyond the reach of conventional tragedy. Then there was the notion of genius of famine and the gold of the drunk man staining the pavement to feed millions. And here—in loathsome territory—one came closer perhaps to Mother Diver’s terrifying judgement of love that had occasioned guilt in Sebastian under the spire of the law. Guilt? Or was it something else, some nameless emotion?
    Comedy? No. A kind of unsmiling humour, yes.
    Tragedy? No. A kind of eccentric nemesis, yes.
    Guilt? No. Not guilt. Except in response to bleak love.
    Mother Diver’s arts of the “kingdom of mothers” possessed no classification, purest loathing yet incorrigible affection for desperate humanity….
    An odd vibration shook the world, the timbers of the ship in Dolphin Street. Mary felt an indescribable cosmic tenderness she could not fathom. She turned to Sebastian and made love as if Stella had indeed vanished from their bed. Yet Mother Bleak Love was there and had moved the world a faint inch or two into curative doubt of all conventional classifications to absorb the shock of a wave, the shock of compassion. *
    The cosmos had been moved a faint inch or two. The planet Bale was affected. A skull-like formation of rock presided there called Rudimentary Brain from earth where it had been first sighted by an amateur astronomer from Angel Inn. Now the shock of cosmic tenderness and ruthlessness awakened a fire on Bale. Fire was the mind of nature in space. Fire was subtle conversion of nature in space. It became the womb of the brain or the rock on Bale.
    Indeed the tremor had shaken Mary’s diminutive cosmos. An ocean had filled a bath when she travelled to India. Now a bale or loaded box from a lorry became a planet. Mary repaired to Angel Inn in the afternoon to find Marsden ill and in bed. He had suffered a shock. In turning a corner, a lorry had overturned that morning and flung a train of bales on to the ground. One narrowly missed Father Marsden before it ploughed into a gate. Was it a meteor from Mother Diver’s shawl? It had happened within a stone’s throw of the supermarket.
    Mary sat, quiet as a mouse, by the great four-poster on which Joseph lay. He looked all at once very ill. His black, greying beard lay against his chest and white roughened skin. And for a flashing moment—faint inch moving the cosmos—Mary was reminded of Sebastian’s hollow tree of a body.
    “Nothing serious,” Joseph said. “A very minor heart attack. More shock than anything else. They did not even worry to keep me in hospital. As you see I’m here….”
    But he was dying. She knew. Bath, bale, hollow tree and other functions of negative capacity or capability became elements in a progression neither comic nor tragic, the diminutive funeral of an age, not large-scale imperial funeral, jet-planes flying overhead, tanks on land, warships at sea, but precarious Utopian utensils in which to store water and food for the baptism of the small soul and the nourishment and protection of the dying body. That a bale, the container of choice dates, silks, clothing, had functioned as a deadly meteor was the unsmiling humour of the Diver woman.
    Marsden tried to laugh it away but as he looked at Mary his eyes were grave. It was an immensely difficult task—whether as the ex-priest or the ex-dialectician that ancient Joseph Marsden was—to face his departure, his coming death, in the light of the aroused kingdom of mothers that began to replace him and to shake Mary’s world.
    Could he, he wondered, humour her on the very brink of the grave, humour her to see that she stood between him and Mother Diver as Stella had stood between her and Sebastian? That as he diminished, her diminutive stature would increase to encompass men and women everywhere in mutual arts of the “genius of love”?
    Could he humour her on