Angels and Visitations Read online

  They’d been ready for a long time, but they had to be asked . . .

  When the thing came through the door Peter started screaming, but he really didn’t scream for very long.

  THE MYSTERY OF FATHER BROWN

  AN ESSAY FROM 100 GREAT DETECTIVES

  IT IS not that Father Brown stories lack colour. Chesterton was, after all, an artist, and begins almost every story by painting in light. “The evening daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.” (“The Man in the Passage”); “It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in the early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold, and pewter rather than silver.” (“The God of the Gongs”); “The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts from a shilling paint box.” (“The Fairy Tale of Father Brown”)—three examples picked at random from The Wisdom of Father Brown, each occurring in the first paragraph.

  We first meet him in “The Blue Cross”, a bumbling Essex curate, laden down with brown paper parcels and an umbrella. Chesterton borrowed the parcels, the umbrella, and perhaps the central character from his friend Father John O’Connor—once he had discovered, with surprise, that a priest (whom society assumes to be unworldly) must by profession be on close terms with the World and its sins. “The Blue Cross” illustrates this principle: Flambeau, the master-thief, is out-thought every step of the way by the little priest, because the priest understands theft.

  He had black clerical garb and a flat hat; sandy hair, and grey eyes as “empty as the North Sea”. He was Father Brown (possible initial J, possible first name Paul), one of the greatest colourless figures of detective fiction, who continued through another sixty-odd short stories; less concerned with hounding down criminals, relentlessly bringing them to justice, or with solving crimes, than with offering the offender a chance at forgiveness, or merely being the commonsense vehicle that illuminates a Chestertonian paradox. Other great fictional detectives receive biographies, as aficionados backfill details of their lives and exploits (where was Watson’s wound?); but Father Brown defies attempts to round out the details of his life outside of the canon. He had no home life, no early years, no last bow. He lacked colour.

  It was Chesterton himself who pointed out that his subtitle to the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, “A Nightmare”, tended to be overlooked. Perhaps that explains something else about the Father Brown stories: their logic is dream logic. The characters from a Father Brown story have little existence before the story starts, none after it has finished: each cast of innocents and malefactors is assembled to make the story work, and for no other reason. The tales are not exercises in deduction, for rarely is the reader presented with a set of clues and logical problems to work through. Instead they are the inspired magic tricks of a master showman, or tromp l’oeil paintings in which the application of a little brown suddenly turns an Eastern swami into a private secretary, or a suicide into a murder and back again.

  The Father Brown stories are a game of masks—it is rare that an unmasking of some kind does not occur. The denouement tends less to be a summation of misdirected clues, than a revelation of who, in the story one has read, was really whom.

  It has been said that Chesterton was not proud of Father Brown; it is true that he wrote the stories, especially in the latter days, to fund GK’s Weekly, the mouthpiece for his theories of Distributism (a sort of bucolic socialism, in which every right-thinking Englishman would own his own cow, and a plot of land to graze it on). It is also true that many of the Father Brown stories are repetitive; there are only so many masks, so many times a man can disguise himself as himself. But even the worst of the stories contains something magical and rare: a sunset, perhaps, or a fabulous last line.

  Chesterton himself was colourful, larger that life: one would imagine that in the creation of a detective he would have opted for the flamboyant—his hero would be a Flambeau, or a Sunday. Father Brown, on the other hand, seems created less as a detective than as a reaction to detectives, in a milieu in which, as GKC complained, “. . . the front of the cover shows somebody shot/ And the back of the cover will tell you the plot.” (“Commercial Candour”).

  You cannot celebrate Father Brown, for he doesn’t exist. In the Chestertonian game of masks, the detective is the McGuffin, significant by his very insignificance. A plain little goblin of a man, less disorganised and flustered the more the tales go on, but still colourless to the extreme as he walks among the mirrors and the ever-changing lights.

  “One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this,” said Chesterton, discussing his fondness for drawing with chalks on brown paper, “that white is also a colour.” And it is also a wise and awful truth that the most colourless of all detectives was employed to reveal the most colourful of all detective stories.

  MURDER MYSTERIES

  The Fourth Angel says:

  Of this order I am made one,

  From Mankind to guard this place

  That through their Guilt they have foregone,

  For they have forfeited His Grace;

  Therefore all this must they shun

  Or else my Sword they shall embrace

  And myself will be their Foe

  To flame them in the Face.

  Chester Mystery Cycle:

  The Creation, and Adam and Eve, 1461.

  THIS IS true.

  Ten years ago, give or take a year, I found myself on an enforced stopover in Los Angeles, a long way from home. It was December, and the California weather was warm and pleasant. England, however, was in the grip of fogs and snowstorms, and no planes were landing there. Each day I’d phone the airport, and each day I’d be told to wait another day.

  This had gone on for almost a week.

  I was barely out of my teens. Looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve received a gift, unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation. Nothing to do with me, I could say, innocently. If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

  I was in Los Angeles. Yes.

  On the sixth day I received a message from an old sort-of-girlfriend from Seattle: she was in LA too, and she had heard I was around on the friends-of-friends network. Would I come over?

  I left a message on her machine. Sure.

  That evening: a small, blonde woman approached me, as I came out of the place I was staying. It was already dark.

  She stared at me, as if she were trying to match me to a description, and then, hesitantly, she said my name.

  “That’s me. Are you Tink’s friend?”

  “Yeah. Car’s out back. C’mon; she’s really looking forward to seeing you.”

  The woman’s car was one of the huge old boat-like jobs you only ever seem to see in California. It smelled of cracked and flaking leather upholstery. We drove out from wherever we were to wherever we were going.

  Los Angeles was at that time a complete mystery to me; and I cannot say I understand it much better now. I understand London, and New York, and Paris: you can walk around them, get a sense of what’s where in just a morning of wandering. Maybe catch the subway. But Los Angeles is about cars. Back then I didn’t drive at all; even today I will not drive in America. Memories of LA for me are linked by rides in other people’s cars, with no sense there of the shape of the city, of the relationships between the people and the place. The regularity of the roads, the repetition of structure and form, mean that when I try to remember it as an entity all I have is the boundless profusion of tiny lights I saw one night on my first trip to the city, from the hill of Griffith Park. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, from that distance.

  “See that building?” said my blonde driver, Tink’s fr
iend. It was a redbrick art deco house, charming and quite ugly.

  “Yes.”

  “Built in the 1930s,” she said, with respect and pride.

  I said something polite, trying to comprehend a city inside which fifty years could be considered a long time.

  “Tink’s real excited. When she heard you were in town. She was so excited.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

  Tink’s real name was Tinkerbell Richmond. No lie.

  She was staying with friends in small apartment clump, somewhere an hour’s drive from downtown LA.

  What you need to know about Tink: she was ten years older than me, in her early thirties; she had glossy black hair and red, puzzled lips, and very white skin, like Snow White in the fairy stories; the first time I met her I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Tink had been married for a while at some point in her life, and had a five-year-old daughter called Susan. I had never met Susan—when Tink had been in England, Susan had been staying on in Seattle, with her father.

  People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan.

  Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.

  I do not remember arriving at Tink’s house, nor where her flatmate went.

  What I remember next is sitting in Tink’s lounge, with the lights low; the two of us next to each other, on the sofa.

  We made small talk. It had been perhaps a year since we had seen one another. But a twenty-one-year-old boy has little to say to a thirty-two-year-old woman, and soon, having nothing in common, I pulled her to me.

  She snuggled close with a kind of sigh, and presented her lips to be kissed. In the half-light her lips were black. We kissed for a little, and I stroked her breasts through her blouse, on the couch; and then she said:

  “We can’t fuck. I’m on my period.”

  “Fine.”

  “I can give you a blow job, if you’d like.”

  I nodded assent, and she unzipped my jeans, and lowered her head to my lap.

  After I had come, she got up and ran into the kitchen. I heard her spitting into the sink, and the sound of running water: I remember wondering why she did it, if she hated the taste that much.

  Then she returned and we sat next to each other on the couch.

  “Susan’s upstairs, asleep,” said Tink. “She’s all I live for. Would you like to see her?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  We went upstairs. Tink led me into a darkened bedroom. There were child-scrawl pictures all over the walls—wax-crayoned drawings of winged fairies and little palaces—and a small, fair-haired girl was asleep in the bed.

  “She’s very beautiful,” said Tink, and kissed me. Her lips were still slightly sticky. “She takes after her father.”

  We went downstairs. We had nothing else to say, nothing else to do. Tink turned on the main light. For the first time I noticed tiny crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes, incongruous on her perfect, Barbie-doll face.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like a ride back?”

  “If you don’t mind leaving Susan alone . . . ?”

  She shrugged, and I pulled her to me for the last time.

  At night, Los Angeles is all lights. And shadows.

  A blank, here, in my mind. I simply don’t remember what happened next. She must have driven me back to the place where I was staying—how else would I have gotten there? I do not even remember kissing her goodbye. Perhaps I simply waited on the sidewalk and watched her drive away.

  Perhaps.

  I do know, however, that once I reached the place I was staying I just stood there, unable to go inside, to wash and then to sleep, unwilling to do anything else.

  I was not hungry. I did not want alcohol. I did not want to read, or talk. I was scared of walking too far, in case I became lost, bedeviled by the repeating motifs of Los Angeles, spun around and sucked in so I could never find my way home again. Central Los Angeles sometimes seems to me to be nothing more than a pattern, like a set of repeating blocks: a gas station, a few homes, a mini-mall (donuts, photo developers, laundromats, fast-foods), and repeat until hypnotised; and the tiny changes in the mini-malls and the houses only serve to reinforce the structure.

  I thought of Tink’s lips. Then I fumbled in a pocket of my jacket, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

  I lit one, inhaled, blew blue smoke into the warm night air.

  There was a stunted palm tree growing outside the place I was staying, and I resolved to walk for a way, keeping the tree in sight, to smoke my cigarette, perhaps even to think; but I felt too drained to think. I felt very sexless, and very alone.

  A block or so down the road there was a bench, and when I reached it I sat down. I threw the stub of the cigarette onto the pavement, hard, and watched it shower orange sparks.

  Someone said, “I’ll buy a cigarette off you, pal. Here.”

  A hand, in front of my face, holding a quarter. I looked up.

  He did not look old, although I would not have been prepared to say how old he was. Late thirties, perhaps. Mid-forties. He wore a long, shabby coat, colorless under the yellow street lamps, and his eyes were dark.

  “Here. A quarter. That’s a good price.”

  I shook my head, pulled out the packet of Marlboros, offered him one. “Keep your money. It’s free. Have it.”

  He took the cigarette. I passed him a book of matches (it advertised a telephone sex line; I remember that), and he lit the cigarette. He offered me the matches back, and I shook my head. “Keep them. I always wind up accumulating books of matches in America.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sat next to me, and smoked his cigarette. When he had smoked it halfway down, he tapped the lighted end off on the concrete, stubbed out the glow, and placed the butt of the cigarette behind his ear.

  “I don’t smoke much,” he said. “Seems a pity to waste it, though.”

  A car careened down the road, veering from one side to the other. There were four young men in the car: the two in the front were both pulling at the wheel, and laughing. The windows were wound down, and I could hear their laughter, and the two in the back seat (“Gaary, you asshole! What the fuck are you onnn mannnn?”) and the pulsing beat of a rock song. Not a song I recognised. The car looped around a corner, out of sight.

  Soon the sounds were gone, too.

  “I owe you,” said the man on the bench.

  “Sorry?”

  “I owe you something. For the cigarette. And the matches. You wouldn’t take the money. I owe you.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed. “Really, it’s just a cigarette. I figure, if I give people cigarettes, then if ever I’m out, maybe people will give me cigarettes.” I laughed, to show I didn’t really mean it, although I did. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Mm. You want to hear a story? True story? Stories always used to be good payment. These days . . .” He shrugged. “. . . Not so much.”

  I sat back on the bench, and the night was warm, and I looked at my watch: it was almost one in the morning. In England a freezing new day would already have begun: a workday would be starting for those who could beat the snow and get into work; another handful of old people, and those without homes, would have died, in the night, from the cold.

  “Sure,” I said to the man. “Sure. Tell me a story.”

  He coughed, grinned white teeth—a flash in the darkness—and he began.

  “First thing I remember was the Word. And the Word was God. Sometimes, when I get really down, I remember the sound of the Word in my head, shaping me, forming me, giving me life.

  “The Word gave me a body, gave
me eyes. And I opened my eyes, and I saw the light of the Silver City.

  “I was in a room—a silver room—and there wasn’t anything in it except me. In front of me was a window, that went from floor to ceiling, open to the sky, and through the window I could see the spires of the City, and at the edge of the City, the Dark.

  “I don’t know how long I waited there. I wasn’t impatient or anything, though. I remember that. It was like I was waiting until I was called; and I knew that some time I would be called. And if I had to wait until the end of everything, and never be called, why, that was fine too. But I’d be called, I was certain of that. And then I’d know my name, and my function.

  “Through the window I could see silver spires, and in many of the other spires were windows; and in the windows I could see others like me. That was how I knew what I looked like.

  “You wouldn’t think it of me, seeing me now, but I was beautiful. I’ve come down in the world a way since then.

  “I was taller then, and I had wings.

  “They were huge and powerful wings, with feathers the colour of mother-of-pearl. They came out from just between my shoulderblades. They were so good. My wings.

  “Sometimes I’d see others like me, the ones who’d left their rooms, who were already fulfilling their duties. I’d watch them soar through the sky from spire to spire, performing errands I could barely imagine.

  “The sky above the City was a wonderful thing. It was always light, although lit by no sun—lit, perhaps by the City itself: but the quality of light was forever changing. Now pewter-coloured light, then brass, then a gentle gold, or a soft and quiet amethyst . . .”

  The man stopped talking. He looked at me, his head on one side. There was a glitter in his eyes that scared me. “You know what amethyst is? A kind of purple stone?”

  I nodded.

  My crotch felt uncomfortable.

  It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad; I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.