The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds) Read Online Free Page A

and whisperingly silent) and made her way across to a window overlooking the garden that came around from the front to the side of the house.
    She deposited her bag on the table by the window and had begun to unbutton her coat when a sound caused her to spin around towards a great desk diagonally across from her in the huge, high-domed study. The book cases lining the wall became a swift blur as her eyes focused on a black youth (he could have been eighteen or nineteen years old) who had been seated at Marsden’s desk but had now sprung to his feet. For a moment she was paralysed with fright and convinced he would attack her. They were alone in the house. The city receded even more than it had already done the moment she came through the door. She felt with intolerable vividness the loud ticking of the great, gloomy clock high on the wall over Marsden’s desk, as if each sound came glimmering through its shadow-strewn face where the light streaked the glass over the Roman numerals, the long hand and the short.
    The young man’s body and head stood just below and in line with the clock on the wall that seemed now a clown’s moon, however menacing, plucked from her own body to adorn external cave or womb or study. There had been stories in the local papers of women who had been attacked and robbed in the middle of the day. Thirteen minutes to eleven. Millions were being born, millions were dying. Mary read the time exactly through the shadowy multitude in the clock. She also “read”, at the heart of the clowning moon, it seemed, above the young man’s head, that he (like every thief of time) was lame. He had moved, limped a little, and she saw that his left ankle was bandaged. He belonged to the endless millions of the dying, of the newly born, all ages, all foetal humanity. The carpet between them had turned to charmed blood, her frozen blood mingling with his, his with hers like glass.
    He was dressed in soft, leather shoes, the bandage on his naked foot, tennis shorts (such as a jogger might wear for a brisk trot around the block), and a thick sweater of greyish-blue. His face quivered slightly, the bones clear and sharp (so much so she wondered if he was much older than she first thought he was), giving extra tension to a tuft of beard on his chin. Her fears began to revive. The material and immaterial presence of millions enfolding them became scales of twin-memory, flesh of memory, and made her feel suddenly black and naked herself. And yet his eyes, she was convinced, were as frightened as hers in the moon of time, so frightened they saw through her blackness to her white breasts and her white belly and thighs.
    Fright and fear bred violence (Marsden seemed to be saying to her as she confronted the black man in the room who seemed older and yet younger than she could gauge in her confused state of mind). For that very reason (Marsden implied) there was a compulsion or infectious Cupid’s arrow in her—and in him—that ran deep as love, true love, perverse love. It was obscure, that compulsion and arrow, but it related to the target of unfinished being, to a summons she had issued to him. She had summoned him or he her, though when or where that summons, that call, had gone forth was buried in layers of desire, the desire for pigmented luxuries, necessities, commodities of harsh and sweet emotion, daemonic possessions through which to extend one’s reach and grasp, one’s body, one’s brain and muscle. That was the key to every white or black, schizophrenic Cupid who had afflicted her in afflicting him, that was the perverse adolescence of civilization, perverse comedy, key or arrow of greed or dragon’s rape or love that encircled the globe.
    Love! What was love save the key to lock or unlock fear? To love was to fear the keys of god and man alike, angel and trickster alike, thief and saint alike, child and monster alike. To love was to fear the keys of the kingdom. And once again she wanted to seize the