David John Johnson, one time child miner in various Welsh pits, bit part actor on later epoch Victorian stages, with a strong baritone voice, stitched full facemasks together from leather gloves acquired, by slightly surreptitious means, from society ladies on their cultural evenings out at the opera, or the theatre houses and concert venues of our grandest of cities. He wore these masks in the dirty dark of gaslight night and thus was touched by the loveliness and elegance of his time.
David John Johnson, not being particularly proficient at the noble art of stitching, was never really one hundred percent satisfied with the results of his artworks for, wearing one of his creations, his face appeared, out there, in the tarnished mirror in his workshop, to have taken on the sun baked leprous texture and sepia colour of illustrations of diseased dark populations of the Empire displayed in illustrated magazines that charitable ladies would pass on to each other with earnest sounding voices saying, in decorous whispers,
“Something really ought to be done for them....Poor dears....”
Perhaps ladies of such breeding would take pity on him, but, whatever the case might be, wearing his masks, he at least, had been touched by them and, from the inside, for the insider, his masks were the tortured faces of the wise and the aged, the venerated, and were so because he was, he convinced himself, voyaging back and forth in time and space caressed by women of virtue, education and good taste who wore soft, well cured leather with just a faint reminiscence, now and then, of delicate perfumes and face powders.
It is difficult, well nigh impossible, to respect a secret, let alone understand its significance or true reach and David John Johnson’s wife was no exception to this well established tenet. One late rainy Friday evening, not long after Johnson had donned his silk top hat, tails and his most recent, and, as yet, most carefully realised face of wisdom, with its dash of sun bleached pink, his traitorous lady wife and young scamp of a son consigned his tatty and soiled (to their appreciation) collection of upper class cultural caresses, his time and place machines (though they had no inkling of any of these concepts), to the fires of hell (the stove in the corner of the greasy white tiled kitchen downstairs) in a spasm of self induced shame and impotence, and she sermonised,
“Cauterise the present and the future be purified!”
“How the ignorant deceive themselves into a profound belief in such simplistic solutions. They always miss the box at the back of the wardrobe to concentrate on the locked chest in the alcove behind the tapestry in the workshop....”
Was the thought he kept to himself in the midst of her sermonising.
Under the porch, dark eyes, distorted through a lozenge of glass in the leaded window on the right of the front door, dark deep-set eyes look into another world, another universe. Safari trophies from every part, severed heads stare down on etchings of bulky beasts from some far distant exotic African colony, hung on the wall above the blazing fireplace of Lord and Lady Townsend Coles’ reception room. Sun baked, earth encrusted, rhinoceros hide, the beast. The beast.
“The Beasts!”
“I just cannot, for the life of me, imagine what has become of those dear pink gloves, can you, Arthur? James, James! ....Ah, James, I need a brandy before we leave....”
Once upon a time, thankfully, David John Johnson’s darling wife passed away. She contracted an influenza which complicated into a pneumonia, her lungs had never been very resistant to infections, so there was little to be done and his son had vacated the premises, poisoned by his mother’s shameless love and protectiveness for him, unable to look his father directly in the eyes ever again since one fiery night, years before, when they had waited up for father’s return and he had welcomed them both, from a wisdom deep inside his best face, in the hall, with a hug and kiss and a
“Jolly good night to the both of you!”
There was nothing else to be done, nothing else to be said.
There was nothing else to be done, but one bright break of day, David John Johnson woke to discover, in the oval mirror above the washbasin, that his time travelling days were over, finally he had actually arrived at his destination without having been touched by his lovely lady friends at all, and he was serene and happy beyond belief, king in his castle.
It is complicated, however, well nigh impossible to respect a secret and, on his deathbed David J. Johnson’s not so well beloved son insisted on bringing his fiancée to his father’s den of iniquity with the intention of teaching her the lesson of how he had avoided the traps and snares of moral perversion, moral perversion and social depravity in the figure of his father, the freak wasting away in penury, on greyish bed sheets, in front of their very eyes!
“I could have ended up in that Godforsaken state, don’t you just know it?”
Of course, Dawn, my future grandmother, fifteen years old that week past, never said a word of it to her fiancé, but this old man, to her mind’s eye, was a picture of pure contentment and she wondered if she would ever manage to be as happy as he appeared to be as she gently pulled at each finger of her dark claret coloured leather gloves in turn, finally revealing pastel pale, delicate, gorgeous hands the like of which David had never seen before. Cool alabaster hands on a tight black silk bodice, and he knew he had finally been profoundly touched for the ultimate time and he moved his deeply lined face, haloed in pure silver hair, better to see Dawn, slightly towards the couple framed, in late afternoon light, in the curtained window,.
His deathbed smile for her eyes only, was the smile of a wisdom hidden behind no mask, and his last words came from a place only wisdom could travel to, hand in glove, in a broken baritone,
“God doesn’t know, Dawn, but there’s heat in the deep down seams, darkness in the hot night, gas in the streetlamps, light in cupboard, dark in space, coal in the bunker out back black, light in the box at the back of the wardrobe. Head in hand, hand in glove, glove in hand, blood in your veins, in the universe, in the universe an infinity of wondrous, beautiful things, child, and you are one of them.”
David John Johnson’s son was never to be my grandfather, but he was to be a man of god.
