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

window and SHOUT … scream for help from any and every passer-by. He may have divined her thoughts, he may have read her hysteric endorsement of the ambivalences of love and fear through which we judge others and are judged by others. “I’m not a thief,” he cried, “so please don’t make a scene. I haven’t a thing, not a weapon. Look! Nothing.” He spread his arms wide. “Father Marsden knows I’m here, though,” he confessed. “I was forbidden this room … but I saw….” He turned his eyes to the desk. “The door was open and I saw the funny title of that book.” He pointed to the desk.
    “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia ,” said Mary, smiling against her fear and finding her tongue at last. “I put it there myself this week.” His eyes were upon hers now. “I put it …” she began again, then stopped. “I brought you here,” she thought silently. “ Utopia was the bait I used. ”The thought came of its own volition. It seemed irrational, yet true. There was a ticking silence between them, a deeper pull than she could gauge, a deeper call than she knew, that had sounded long, long ago, even before the time when her father’s great-great-grandmother had been hooked by an Englishman to bear him children of mixed blood. Their names, in an eighteenth-century accountant’s ledger, were Chanty, Ambition and Desire. What names with which to saddle a child, names that called to mind Makepeace, Patience and Grace. Nowadays horses were heir to that tradition of names—Cupid’s Bow, Black Romance, Vanity Fair. How inimitable was the wishfulfilment cradle and stable of the human race, how inimitably vulnerable one was, how prone to nurse spectres in every webbed moment or vanity fair of blacks and whites within which one was entangled. Black Anancy (Marsden had told her) meant god’s chariot, god’s tapestry and trickster-spider , god’s bandaged, miniature ankle or wheel. How inimitably entangled one was in all fearful nets and creatures one had been purchasing and selling from time immemorial, immemorial object, immemorial flesh-and-blood.
    Anancy suddenly hobbled to the door on his bandaged foot. There was something almost deliberate, almost masochistic, in the way he seemed to stand on the injured limb as if it gave him pleasure. Mary remained at the window, riveted there still by fear (or was it by obscurest affection?). Whose need was greater, she wondered, hers or his? All at once he appeared in the street. He waved at her. Her white face through the glass must have looked like a ghost’s! Then suddenly he shot away like greased lightning. Incredible! Her heart almost stopped. She could scarcely believe her eyes. Had it all been a trick, the bandaged ankle, the infirm gait? Was he a practised thief after all who deceived everyone with a twisted foot? She rushed forward without thinking into the corridor of the house, wondering if anything outside had been snatched, a vase, a mask or painting, anything, and in her bewilderment and rage—as she gained the beautifully furnished entrance hall—the sensation enveloped her that he was still here, still in the house, running for all he was worth not outside in the street but inside in the corridor upon the bridge of Angel Inn between worlds past, present and future. She saw him coming out of a future that resembled the past (the significant minority of blacks that had once lived in Europe) and she collapsed in a dead faint.
    Mary came to herself with Father Marsden’s beard falling towards her like grey-black moss in a dry riverbed to which she had been transported. She was in a daze and he helped her up from the floor and with an arm around her led her back into the study. “Oh my god,” she said. Her memory was blank.
    He led her to the great armchair by his desk into which she slipped with the luxurious sensation of reclining in an upright bed or couch. “A little wine,” he said. She sipped the red wine, the shadow of memory was returning, she