I met Gabriel Angel in 1956. The year Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. I was going home. Gabriel Angel was leaving home. We were both going to the same place. We were going to London. The Millers were there too at the time.
The Cowdenbeath was a pre-war liner with a mahogany lining. She looked like a bath-time boat with two fat black funnels and a comfortable way of sitting in the water. She had been money and ease, the Nancy Astor generation, not the frugal fifties.
She had been requisitioned as a troop ship during the war, and now her cruising days were over, she was faded, just a ferry, when I got to her. Once a month she sailed from Southampton to St Lucia and once a month she sailed back again. One end of the bath to the other in eight days. She didn’t have glamour but she had plenty of stories to tell and I’ve always liked that in a woman. It is what I liked about Gabriel Angel.
Journeys make me nervous, so I was up too early on the morning of my leaving, opening and shutting my trunk and bothering the porters about safe storage. The gangway up to the Cowdenbeath was busy with bodies run random like ants before ants. There was freight to be loaded, food to get on board, everything to be cleared before eleven o’clock embarkation.
Invisible worlds, or worlds that are supposed to be invisible interest me. I like to see the effort it takes for some people to make things go smoothly for other people. Don’t misunderstand me; mostly I’m part of the invisible world myself.
A couple of hours after I had permanently creased my permanent press suit by sitting hunched up in a roll of rope, I saw a good-looking black woman, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five, standing with her feet together, a little brown suitcase in her hand. She was staring at the boat as if she intended to buy it. If the sea hadn’t been on one side, she would have walked right round, her head cocked like a spaniel, her eyes eager and thoughtful.
After a few moments she was joined by a much older woman with a particular dignity. The younger one said something to her, then spread out her arm towards the ship. Whatever it was, they both laughed, which did nothing for my nerves. I wanted to be reassured by the imposing vessel before me, not have it picked at like a cotton bale.
I climbed out of my rope hole, grabbed my hat, and sauntered towards them. They didn’t give me a glance, but I heard the older one asking to be sent a tin of biscuits with a picture of the Queen on the lid. It is the same all over the Commonwealth; they all love the latest Queen. She’s too young for me.
The steward showed me to my cabin. Mr Duncan Stewart D22. I opened my hand luggage, spread a few things on the lower bunk, and went back up on deck to watch the spectacle. I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn’t be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I’m a Hemingway man myself although I don’t believe it is right to hunt lions.
Look at these two coming on deck right now; lesbians I’ll bet. Both about sixty-five, shrunk into their cotton suits and wearing ancient Panamas. The stout one has a face the colour and texture of a cricket ball and the thin one looks as if she’s been folded once too often.
What brogues the stout one is wearing; polished like conkers and laced too tight. Shoe lacing is a revealing and personal matter. There are criss-cross lacers; the neat brisk people who like a pattern under the surface. There are straight-lacers; who pretend to be tougher than they are but when they come undone, boy, are they undone. There are the tie-tights; the ones who need to feel secure, and there are the slack-jacks, who like to leave themselves a little loose, the ones who would rather not wear shoes at all. I’ve met people who always use a double knot. They are liars. I’m telling you because I know.
Once the lesbians had gone by, trailing their old woman smell of heavy scent and face powder, I went back downstairs, intending to nap for an hour. I was suddenly very tired. I wanted to get my jacket off, let my feet smell, and wake up an hour later to a Scotch and Soda. In my mind I was through the sleep and tasting the drink.
I opened the door to my cabin. There was the young woman I had noticed earlier on the dock. She turned at the noise of the door and looked surprised.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
‘There must be some mistake,’ I said, ‘this is my cabin.’ She frowned and picked up a cabin list from the top of her little suitcase. Her voice lilted.
‘D22. G Angel and D Stewart.’
‘That’s right. I am Duncan Stewart.’
‘And I am Gabriel Angel.’
‘You should be a man.’
She looked confused and examined herself in the mirror. I tried to pursue this obvious line. Obvious to me.
‘Gabriel is a man’s name.’
‘Gabriel is an angel’s name,’ she said.
‘Angels are men. Look at Raphael and Michael.’
‘Look at Gabriel.’
I did look at her. No wings but great legs. Still, I was tired and did not want to argue theology with a young woman I had never met. I thought about the bunk and the Scotch and started feeling sorry for myself. I decided to go and tackle the Purser.
‘You stay here until I get back,’ I commanded, ‘I’ll straighten it out.’
I didn’t straighten it out. The ship was crammed to the lifeboats. The Purser, like me, like any normal person guided by Bible basics, had assumed Gabriel was a man’s name. That’s why we had been yoked together. Second Class ticket holders can’t be choosy. I had to explain all this to her but she didn’t flinch. Either she was as innocent as she looked or she was an old hand. Some of these girls have been milking men since breast-swell. I didn’t want any trouble.
‘Top or bottom?’ I asked, getting ready to move my stuff.
‘Top,’ she said. ‘I like heights.’
She climbed up and lay down and I eased myself below, keeping my shoes on, in case my feet smelled. I was disappointed. I had expected to share but I had hoped for some tough guy who wanted late night Scotch and a pack of cards. When you dig under the surface, past the necessities, men and women don’t mix.
Her head came dipping over the side of the bunk.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I.’
There was a pause, then she asked me what I did for a living.
‘I’m a business man. I do business.’
She was looking at me upside down, like a big brown bat. She was making me feel sea-sick.
‘What about you?’ I said, not caring.
‘I’m an aviator.’
Eight days at sea. One day longer than God needed to invent the whole world, including its holiday pattern. Two days longer than he took to make her Grandmother Eve and my Grandfather Adam. This time I am not falling for the apple.
We sat up on deck today, Gabriel Angel and myself. She told me she was born in 1937, the day that Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to complete the Atlantic crossing, solo flight. Her granddaddy, as she calls him, told her it was an omen, and that’s why they called her Gabriel, ‘bringer of Good News,’ a bright flying thing.
Her granddaddy taught her to fly in the mail planes he ran between the islands. He told her she had to be smarter than life, find a way of beating gravity, and to believe in herself as angels do, their bodies bright as dragonflies, great gold wings cut across the sun.
I’m not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I’m telling you because I know.
She said, ‘I am poor but even the poorest inherit something, their daddy’s eyes, their mother’s courage. I inherited the dreams.’
I leaned back. I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn’t interested in a little black girl’s dreams.
She said, ‘Mr Stewart, have you ever been in love?’ She was leaning over the side, watching the ocean. I watched the curve of her spine, the slender tracings of her hips beneath her dress. I wanted to touch her. I don’t know why. She’s too young for me.
Before I could answer, although I don’t know how I would have answered, she started talking about a man with stars in his hair and arms stretched out like wings to hold her.
I moved away as soon as I could.
What is there to say about love? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn’t be any different, wouldn’t feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can’t tame we talk about. I’m talking a lot about Gabriel Angel.
If I were able to speak the truth, I’d say I had a fiancée before the War, and we’re going back to 1938 now. She had a thick plait of hair that ran all the way down her back. She could wrap her hair around her as though it were a snake. I was no snake charmer.
She was a farmer’s daughter, had a heart like a tractor to pull any man out of himself. Her hair was red the way the sun is red first thing in the morning. She had a look about her that took everything seriously, even the wood pile. There were plenty of men who would have traded their bodies for a split log, just to be under her hands for five minutes. I know I would. We didn’t touch much. She didn’t seem to want it. When we said goodnight at the bottom of her lane she let me run my index finger from her temple to her throat. Such soft hair she had on her face, invisible, but not to my hand.
If I were young again, I would have bounced up to Gabriel Angel on the dock and asked her to come with me on the later sailing. That would have been the Italian line, the real cruise ship. SS Garibaldi softly rocking the Mediterranean. Forget the direct Atlantic crossing, carrying workers and immigrants to a cold place they’ve never seen. I could have held her hand through Martinique, Las Palmas, Tenerife. I could have put my arm around her waist through the straits of Gibraltar. At Barcelona I would have bought her gem Madonnas and seed pearls. Then we would have continued by sea to Genoa and met the boat-train for England. That railway, through Italy, Switzerland and France, was laid in the 1850s and was one of the first to be constructed. I’m told that Robert Browning, poet, and Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also poet, travelled along its length. I would have enjoyed that connection. I should like to run away with Gabriel Angel.
As it is, we’re on this ferry boat to Southampton, the short direct brutal route, and Gabriel Angel has never been in my arms.
It turns out that the two lesbians are missionaries. Miss Bead, the one with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist, tells me they have been in Trinidad for thirty years. Miss Quim, the cricket ball, has taught three generations of hockey teams. They are on their way home to buy a farmhouse together in Wales and get a dog called Rover. I realise they are happy.
I am not sleeping well. Below my cabin is dormitory accommodation, the cheapest way to travel. That’s all right, what’s wrong is the Barbados Banjo Band, twenty-five of them, on their way to the dancehalls of England. It isn’t easy to sleep well piled on top of fifty feet, five hundred fingers and toes and forty-six eyes. Above me are the maddening curves of Gabriel Angel.
In the ship’s lounge, proudly displayed, is a large map of the Atlantic, threaded through with the red line of our route. Every day one of the stewards moves a gay green flag further along the red line, so that we can see where we are. Today we have reached the middle; the point of no return. Today the future is nearer than the past.
I don’t have anyone to go to in England. No one will be waiting for me at Southampton or Victoria. I have a two-bedroomed terraced house in London. I have had it let for the past twelve years and I’ll have to live in a boarding house until it becomes vacant again next month. I won’t recognise anything familiar. I had the agents furnish it cheaply for me.
Later, my cargo will arrive and I’ll start selling Caribbean crafts and trinkets and I suppose I’ll go on doing that until something better comes along or until I die. Looking at my future is like looking at a rainy day through a dirty window.
‘You must be excited, Mr Stewart.’
‘What about, Miss Angel?’
She has been reading my copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: and now she wishes she could live in Yorkshire. I must be careful not to lend her Rob Roy.
Is compassion possible between a man and a woman? When I say (as I have not said), ‘I want to take care of you,’ do I mean ‘I want you to take care of me’?
I am materially comfortable. I can provide. I could protect. I have a lot to offer a young woman in a strange place without friends or money.
‘Will you marry me, Miss Angel?’
It is early in the morning, not yet six o’clock. I have dressed carefully. My tie is even and my shoes are well polished and double knotted. Anyone can look at me now. Up on deck the sea chops at the boat, the waves are like grey icing, forked over. The wind is whipping my coat sleeves and making my eyes water.
Today we will dock at Southampton and I will catch the train to Victoria station and shake hands with my fellow travellers and we will wish each other well and forget each other at once. I think I’ll spend tonight in a good hotel.
Last night I could not sleep, so I climbed the bunk ladder and stared at Gabriel Angel, lying peacefully under the dim yellow safety lamp. Why doesn’t she want me?
The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can’t get warm. Soon Gabriel Angel will come on deck in her short sleeved blouse and carrying a pair of borrowed binoculars. She won’t be cold. She has the sun inside her.
I wish the wind would drop. A man looks silly with tears in his eyes.