was all an invention, he said, to put him in the dock. Sheer fantasy on her part, he said. Better still, it was a lie. An age of obscenities and lies. Who would stand there in the broad daylight and do such a thing? Wasn’t it a fact that she was unable to say what he looked like, what clothes he wore, what he had employed to make such a loud and thunderous racket on the door? Did he, for instance, possess a walking stick…?
Stella protested that she had been in a state of the greatest shock, not simply on seeing the man but over the open bottle of pills that John had come within an ace of consuming and she had forgotten what the man looked like. Perhaps under hypnosis … But Sebastian brushed that aside. The man had grown faint as the phallus of the sun. He was an angel dressed up as a beast. He could have been anybody on earth one faces in the street but, because of one’s intimate worries and stresses, eclipses in one’s mind before a fictional moment, fictional eternity, has elapsed. Even the things he had said had sounded bizarre (he had called her “lady” even as he “judged” her). Under hypnosis she recalled something he mouthed as he stood in the garden:
My age is much older than this circle of earth
or this middle-world could ever attain,
and I was born yesterday—a baby
from my mother’s womb, acclaimed by men.
I’m more attractive than gold ornaments,
even if filigree work adorns them;
I’m more foul than this mouldering timber
or this slob of seaweed spewed up here.
I’m broader than the earth entire,
and more wide than this green world;
a hand can agitate me, and all that I am
can easily be held between three fingers.
I’m sharper and more biting than sharp frost,
the fierce rime that settles on the soil;
I’m hotter than the fire, the flames
surging and flickering at Vulcan’s forge.
I am, besides, sweeter to the palate
than the honeycomb mingled with honey;
I’m more bitter than wormwood, too
that stands, ashen, on this hillside.
(Father Marsden identified this as a late eleventh-century English poem of which Mary was unaware from the Exeter Book Riddles ;it was a riddle of the creator.)
Dolphin Street was, on the whole, in a quiet if not “seaweed” thoroughfare. The intruder may have been a sailor or a candlestick maker or a butcher who was loitering but posing no good reason for passers-by to suspect him. His back was to the street as he stood in the garden. And even if the next door neighbour had seen him (which was unlikely) it had all happened so quickly that he would have been there and gone before anyone could sing Jackson or, for that matter, Mack the Knife.
Stella appealed to Mary for support but Mary, in this instance, was on Sebastian’s side. She felt almost as guilty as Stella. The danger to John was all she could see; and the wall between the two women rose higher than ever in their fictional identities. Stella blamed herself for blabbing to them of the nightmare riddle she had had. Perhaps it had been a dream, one of the few she woke and vividly recalled. No, it was true. It had all happened though there was no one to prove it but herself.
As the wall continued to rise between them like an ephemeral, yet solid sea Stella saw the tidal deposit or difference between them—between herself and Mary—between herself and an intimate, alien world—clearer than ever now.
Mary’s style or deposit, so to speak, was quite different from hers. Whereas Mary loved a variety of gowns and dresses, she wore rather drab slacks. No eye-shadow, unvarnished nails. Did that suggest a gulf of centuries, weeks, days, religious holidays, profane holidays, on the auction block of fashion? Stella did not know but sometimes she felt she slipped more easily in and out of the crowds of Shepherd’s Bush than Mary did. Indeed she seemed so normal and easy-going that few—perhaps an uncanny Utopian accountant —would have guessed her longing for perfectibility. And even he may have
Stella protested that she had been in a state of the greatest shock, not simply on seeing the man but over the open bottle of pills that John had come within an ace of consuming and she had forgotten what the man looked like. Perhaps under hypnosis … But Sebastian brushed that aside. The man had grown faint as the phallus of the sun. He was an angel dressed up as a beast. He could have been anybody on earth one faces in the street but, because of one’s intimate worries and stresses, eclipses in one’s mind before a fictional moment, fictional eternity, has elapsed. Even the things he had said had sounded bizarre (he had called her “lady” even as he “judged” her). Under hypnosis she recalled something he mouthed as he stood in the garden:
My age is much older than this circle of earth
or this middle-world could ever attain,
and I was born yesterday—a baby
from my mother’s womb, acclaimed by men.
I’m more attractive than gold ornaments,
even if filigree work adorns them;
I’m more foul than this mouldering timber
or this slob of seaweed spewed up here.
I’m broader than the earth entire,
and more wide than this green world;
a hand can agitate me, and all that I am
can easily be held between three fingers.
I’m sharper and more biting than sharp frost,
the fierce rime that settles on the soil;
I’m hotter than the fire, the flames
surging and flickering at Vulcan’s forge.
I am, besides, sweeter to the palate
than the honeycomb mingled with honey;
I’m more bitter than wormwood, too
that stands, ashen, on this hillside.
(Father Marsden identified this as a late eleventh-century English poem of which Mary was unaware from the Exeter Book Riddles ;it was a riddle of the creator.)
Dolphin Street was, on the whole, in a quiet if not “seaweed” thoroughfare. The intruder may have been a sailor or a candlestick maker or a butcher who was loitering but posing no good reason for passers-by to suspect him. His back was to the street as he stood in the garden. And even if the next door neighbour had seen him (which was unlikely) it had all happened so quickly that he would have been there and gone before anyone could sing Jackson or, for that matter, Mack the Knife.
Stella appealed to Mary for support but Mary, in this instance, was on Sebastian’s side. She felt almost as guilty as Stella. The danger to John was all she could see; and the wall between the two women rose higher than ever in their fictional identities. Stella blamed herself for blabbing to them of the nightmare riddle she had had. Perhaps it had been a dream, one of the few she woke and vividly recalled. No, it was true. It had all happened though there was no one to prove it but herself.
As the wall continued to rise between them like an ephemeral, yet solid sea Stella saw the tidal deposit or difference between them—between herself and Mary—between herself and an intimate, alien world—clearer than ever now.
Mary’s style or deposit, so to speak, was quite different from hers. Whereas Mary loved a variety of gowns and dresses, she wore rather drab slacks. No eye-shadow, unvarnished nails. Did that suggest a gulf of centuries, weeks, days, religious holidays, profane holidays, on the auction block of fashion? Stella did not know but sometimes she felt she slipped more easily in and out of the crowds of Shepherd’s Bush than Mary did. Indeed she seemed so normal and easy-going that few—perhaps an uncanny Utopian accountant —would have guessed her longing for perfectibility. And even he may have
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