Mahon - Life on Earth

Marys mind the autumn dark, and shadows have changed place obscurely, each tick an articulate sound, as he dozes off under a rustic bridge. When he wakes at dawn to a slow-waning moon, frozen and scared, curled up like the unborn, the sun blinking behind an owl-eyed barn, frost in the fields and winter coming on, a frigate flutters on a glittering sea. A great cold has gripped the heart already with signs of witchery in an ivy tree: now nothing will ever be the same again. Genie, taper and paper, long solitary cliff walks, cloud thoughts unfolding over the Quantocks sheer to shore beneath high, feathery springs. The cottage shines its light above the rocks, the worlds oceans tear in from the west and an Aeolian harp the size of a snuff-box sings in a casement where its tingling strings record the faintest whisper, the loudest blast. Receptive, tense, adrift in a breezy trance, the frame is seized as if in a nightmare by some quotation, fugue, some fugitive air, some distant echo of the primal scream.

Silence, dead calm, no worldly circumstance; the words form figures and begin to dance and then the miracle, the pleasure dome, the caves of ice, the vibrant dulcimer. Stowey to Gttingen, philosophy in a mist, wide-eyed sublimities of ghost and Geist, wild wind-and-rain effects of Greta Hall, the rattling windows and the icy lake, babbling excursions and the perpetual white roaring rose of a close waterfall; finally Highgate Grove and table talk, a destined harbour for the afflicted soul. Asra and Christabel in confused opium dreams, heartbroken whimpers and nocturnal screams grow ever fainter as he becomes a sage escaped from the inanity, aghast at furious London and its rising smoke, the sinister finance of a dark new age. Dunns pharmacy is only a short walk; his grown-up daughter visits him there at last.

Folk-tale heroines nap in the autumn woods; at Tver, only a hundred versts from Moscow, a wandering gull foreshadows the first snow. The clouds are grand pianos; he makes a note. Gogolian porters blink in smoky shadows, a scent of heliotrope and a buzz of flies. Girl in a blouse, man in a linen suit; the wind goes running in remembered meadows under the vast light of these northern skies: Out here I feel a quickening of the senses far from reviewers and hostile audiences. Nina, hes come this time for a last look at the great forest and your native lake, the clear freshwater ripples you deserted to join the theatre for his sake and yours. He let you down of course, and himself too: his work fell off when he lost sight of you.

Your soul migrated from his icy art; a stuffed gull listens from a chest of drawers. Watch out, hes working on a new novel, his best yet; when it sees the light of day critics, as usual, will find it slight, adroitly done though not a patch on Tolstoy. (So too the friends gathered around his grave: Oh, a great gift, if not quite Turgenev ) A dead seagull, what a terrific story; amazing if you too were there tonight and there you are now, tapping the windowpane like a tense revenant or a familiar ghost. Waves on the water, wind loud in the wood with a raw October evening drawing in, but nobody loves each other as they should. All come and go, to the hotel, the train, the gun room and the veranda; all begin to die, it will be twenty years at most.