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

Author:Harris, Wilson [Harris, Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571302093
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-03-20T20:00:00+00:00

Five

Mary and Sebastian were in bed a couple of nights or so after Paradise Park. Sebastian sound asleep, Mary listening to the hypnotic blow of the wind that had arisen and the rain beating softly upon the window. The house in Dolphin Street was sailing in space. With Stella’s departure, the twinship between herself (Mary) and Sebastian had broken, Mary felt, into stages of reversed transference of heightened spirituality from Father Marsden (her larger-than-life psychiatrist and captain or sailor upon a ship of souls) to other related, obscure global presences and antecedents.

She could still recall Stella’s body and shadow lying between her and Sebastian, and her desire (“my desire,” she said to herself to distinguish herself sharply from Stella) to remain frozen and irreversibly apart from her husband by becoming his fantasy twin and yielding the position of wife to Stella. Thus it was possible to feel everything and still feel nothing of sexual intercourse, to transfer unconscious egg and foetus—when she became pregnant in June 1977—from herself to Stella as if Stella were a legitimate extension of larger-than-life Father Marsden and the child was more his than Sebastian’s.

Now that reversed transference had set in, she appreciated all the more Father Marsden’s qualities of persevering victim through which John himself, her child and Stella’s child, began to come strangely into his own—as if his two fathers and two mothers were no longer alienated and antagonistic but suffused by a stranger and more extraordinary veil-in-depth. In that veil Stella gave way to a new complication through which Mary perceived Sebastian. That complication was Mother Jenny Diver and it seemed to arise from the very deeps of a kingdom of mothers over-arching dual fatherhood.

The sheltered bedside lamp beside her by which she read sometimes far into the night cast its luminous, half-mothering, half-consuming Diver shadow upon Sebastian. He was slowly sinking into the sea over which they hypnotically sailed. Mary was reminded of her disappointment in Paradise Park when Jenny had failed to keep an appointment and only Sukey Tawdrey had appeared.

That disappointment had partially shattered a certain lucidity of expectation, a larger-than-life mirror or pool of rainwater in Father Marsden’s head, translucent shroud, in which Jenny resided. Even with the onset of reversed transference, it had been hard to dislodge Stella from such dominant father in Proudhon’s Karl Joseph though the pool of larger-than-life dialectic dwindled into clockwork Utopia, minute hand striking a hypnotic, funeral, celebrative drum of time, the death of an age, the re-birth of an age.

Lucy Brown in India and Sukey Tawdrey in Paradise Park had taken the process a step farther. Infant bride had turned the clock topsy-turvy into infant bridegroom when Sukey Tawdrey appeared. But that was not all. Sukey Tawdrey’s eyes had fallen from her head to give weight to reversals of time in the womb of space. Infant bridegroom became infant cousin. And species of diminutive clock gleamed afresh upon Mary’s obsession with Sebastian as her twin, Stella’s husband. She had returned to this issue again.

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