M&D - Chapter 16 - Star-Gazing

[Elisabeth Romberg]

Spooky and weird. I hadn't thought of it like that. You think she’s not really real? Uncle Ives did state «There’s no record of her in Gloster» didn’t he. Which I thought was a weird thing to say when I read it at the time. It was like the voice of the author came through, like HE hadn’t found a record of her in Gloster.
But they had children? Where are they? (I had to skip a couple of chapters to ketsjap, it was a terrible decisio but it had to be done) Have they been mentioned?

> 24. mar. 2015 kl. 05.01 skrev Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com>:
> 
> Mason, lost and alone, lovesick for glamorous Susannah and having apparently lost interest in the day's festivities, nearly finds himself The victim of Cheese malevolent when the Vicar's mild roll of a Double Gloucester sets off a near catastrophic chain of unloosened cheeses, with Octuple breaking out of its Wagon and nearly singling out CM for 'Misadventure'.
> 
> Instead, in the best mock-epic romantic fashion, Rebekah dives into the story to save CM. Dressed in Taffeta rather than Silk, suddenly life in Aleppo doesn't seem quite so unappealing.
> 
> TRP is kind enough to explain his wordplay for us: '"Were it Night-time, Sir, I'd say you were out Star-Gazing" ... [which] in the those parts was a young man's term for masturbating'. Unusual for TRP to make the jokes so explicit (I can't help but wonder how many other similar jokes am I missing out on?), but perhaps he wants to emphasise that, for all the brilliance and sublimity of Mason's profession, he is prone to becoming self-absorbed and wrapped up too exclusively in his own world. (I might well be straining for meaning here over a mere double-entendre - rather onanistically so).   
> 
> Mason almost reproaches Rebekah for her blunt comment, but founds himself "stupefied" by her beauty. TRP describes her mouth in ambiguous detail: "Lips slightly apart, in an Inuiry that just fail'd to be a Smile,- like a Gate-Keeper aout to have a word with him". Yet this is the only detail that TRP, lover of verbose descriptions, offers about Rebekah's appearance. He tells us that she's not an English Rose like Susannah, nor a "rugged Blossom of the Heath", but he doesn't tell us what she does look like.
> 
> Admittedly TRP might have elaborated a bit more in a now forgotten earlier passage, but the lack of physical description resonates all the more when we start to question whether Rebekah's a ghost. The Gate-Keeper comment, and Mason's reverie about "black Fumes welling from the Surface of her Apparition, heard her voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts ... the serpents of Hell, real and swift, lying just the other side of her Shadow". 
> 
> This furthers the connection to Eurydice - does Charles fear that Rebekah's been consigned to Hell because she gave birth out of wedlock? The children are registered as Gloucestershire born, but Mason and Rebekah hadn't yet been registered as married - presuming they hadn't got married elsewhere, like Greenwich instead ... or that she is the mother of his children ... or that she existed in the first place ... "I am outside of Time"
> 
> Is Rebekah Mason's muse? His guiding light in his life and his career? '"Look to the Earth," she instructs him. "Belonging to her as I do, I know she lives, and that here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the forces within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you could never guess"'. 

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