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been taken by surprise when Julia pricked a stone and summer flew out of a winter grave enveloped in animal skins and furs in the humour of the cosmos.
    Lastly there was Rima, in her bird sanctuary, goddess of nature and of fire, in Hudson’s Green Mansions , transported abstractly by Epstein into Hyde Park.
    Jen (who was herself of royal Inca blood like a bird of sun) possessed the spirit of the sanctuary in her body as well as she approached the Round Pond from Bayswater Road in the comedy of da Silva’s coronation of the womb. Two months and a day pregnant she was and da Silva had insinuated both the mimesis of catastrophe and the recovery of the foetus of the gods in the elongated feather he planted in her body from within his own loins (as if he dreamt of his own native animal resurrection—animal approximation to the divinity of the rescued self—in a body of art to which he was married).
    Dreamt of the shadowplay of a majestic principle of light, that billowed effortlessly, in a rich complication of judgement day honeymoon between universal gods and goddesses one painted as approximations to resurrectedselves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of heaven or that bank of earth.
    He had, out of religious necessity, religious privacy, put Jen—his own wife—into the canvas for without the down-to-earth , day-to-day, night-to-night, games they played, he had no gateway himself into the serenity of the queen he painted (or into the recovery of father time’s solemn funerals, and wakes of honeymoons, in which one is involved , within the human abyss, each minute of the day and night).
    In the same token without the grotesquerie of animal instinct, that clothed Eleanor Rigby in furs, without the indolence of a winter grave, which had been smitten in a flash, until it bled a new creation or summer sun, he possessed no foothold in the unpredictability of the seasons, the savage lightnings of Christ, the tiger.
    Lady-in-waiting Eleanor had been joined by her husband, the bowler-hatted young man, Harlequin Rigby. In the distance, under the trees, stood Leonard, the black milkman , as if to accentuate an intensity of approximations built into resurrection day carnival.
    A close look again confirmed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Eleanor was none other than the lady-in-furs and Harlequin none other than self-made ironmonger’s son whom Francis had buttonholed that very morning on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green, when he dived into an accumulative masque of tradition with a page from his book to be lodged there, out of instantaneous rebellion, out of instantaneous grief, twenty-five years ago when Julia died and the ironmonger’s wedding began.
    Eleanor’s behaviour now seemed both rich and marvellously eccentric as Francis’s pen dug into the page of masques of tradition on the other side of the grave (in the land of the living), on this side of the cradle (in the land of the unborn), until both positions became co-existent with day-to-day lives on the prick of a pin where populations danced in immensities of time since the earth began. Each letter or line was furred and thick. It may have beenfather time’s grief, it may have been father time’s lust, that set in train a pattern of subconscious and unconscious pages on that memorable day of loss and pain he endured. Until he was driven to write into existence—as fruit of his own body—a self-made/self-created son and self-made/ self-created wife for that son.
    Where his lost peerless Julia was all delicacy and foam in the sea of time, this half-accursed Eleanor was all thickness and coarseness of soil on the reluctant beach of harlequin natures. As though he needed the thunder and lightning of a sexual revolution to shake Eleanor out of Julia’s resurrected sea until her breasts grew large as clay yet rich as waves of gold.
    Clay and gold are premature spirits of awakening perhaps , da Silva thought, as he turned another page in