Black Marsden by Wilson Harris

Author:Wilson Harris [Harris, Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571297504
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-07-16T20:00:00+00:00

9

Goodrich had not been in contact with his visitors for some days after the narrow shave he had had on the Dean Bridge but descending from the rock garden in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens he came almost face to face with Jennifer. She did not appear to see him. Had she deliberately looked through him and ignored him as they passed each other, or was it a genuine distraction which possessed her and made her blind to him at that moment?

His invisibility was embarrassing. He wondered whether he had offended her that morning when she came into the sitting-room in her beauty pack. He had spoken tactlessly perhaps and left the room rather unceremoniously.

Weeks, months had passed—from late winter into summer—over which time he had taken Black Marsden, Jennifer and Knife into his house, FEED MY SHEEP, he thought wryly: the most potent assembly of god’s sheep he could recall—lives that seemed more real than any body of fictions or matching ruses to his inner book, inner diary. No wonder tempers flared every now and then.

Now this morning, for example, had Jennifer deliberately ignored him? On the other hand he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt in his mind—she had been preoccupied as they passed each other. Another thing, having been reduced to the state of a ghost by her, he was comprehensively aware of her—her figure, clothing, gait etc. Some purgatorial necessity perhaps.

It amused him in this context to draw a kind of cartoon of himself run over by the car on the Dean Bridge so that the idea of his ghostliness and invisibility could become comical and relieve him of embarrassment. Thus his comprehensive awareness of her became concretely intuitive and curiously supernatural. She seemed to glow this morning with father sun rather than mother earth whom he had seen plastered on her not so long ago in his sitting-room.

Now, when they came upon each other, she was walking hand in hand with a man he did not know. He had so confidently expected her to stop and introduce her companion that he was smiling even before she came abreast of him. Then as he passed he realized she may have been wholly absorbed by something the man was saying. It had been a shock when she cut him dead but the comical absurdity of being a ghost cushioned the shock into the humour of invisibility. And furthermore he was provided with a chance to look more closely at her companion who became an additional agent in the comprehensive portrait he had begun to paint of her.

This man wasn’t the pale young rider with whom he had seen her in the Royal Mile not very long ago. This was a somewhat older man, down-to-earth looking and wearing solid spectacles, a much more robust man all in all; the air, in fact, of a manual worker, an out-of-doors man. Robust as he was, however, he shared an unmistakable feature with the other man (the pale young rider).

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