Banquet for the Damned (12 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Dante sits cross-legged on the floor of the lounge with a collection of books laid before him: books, cumbersome in size and hardbound, that Eliot gave him in an old leather satchel following their walk on the pier. There are so many, and each looks as indigestible as tough meat.

A second cup of tea fails to revive him after sleeping so late. His nerves are still jangling after so many joints the night before. And after that awful scream, they stayed awake until five, speculating, until the night gave way to a dawn the colour of orange-peel marmalade. Oddly, not since childhood can he remember feeling so grateful for the birth of a new day.

Sunlight gives the flat a nourishing yellow warmth, and the distant sound of the sea makes him eager for the outside world. Towers, ruins, mysterious alleys made out of stone and cooled by the shade, wait beyond their front door. He hopes to explore the town for at least a few days before going to Edinburgh – a place neither of them has ever seen – and the thought of a jam with Tom also appeals. The sentinel of Eliot's old books, however, anchors him to the spot. He will have to make a start amidst the enticing smell of the salty bacon Tom cooks. There was an impatience in Eliot the previous day as he hastily selected the books from around his desk. Saying little, besides murmured assurances of their importance to his studies, Eliot insisted he read them all thoroughly. And, as he is due to meet Eliot at the Orientation on Friday, where he'll be accompanied by Beth, it will be smart to create a better impression than the one he made at their introduction. He needs to gain a feel for Eliot's references, a broader grasp of Eliot's academic field, to inspire confidence in the man he's been asked to assist. Power reading, accelerated learning, discipline, a new sense of order – maybe these things will undermine his drinking, smoking, late sleeping, and notion of damning personal ignorance. He'll learn about history, religion and philosophy. The perpetual cycle of aimless guitar practice, drug taking and unhealthy introspection will be broken. He'll be saved by knowledge. He should be grateful. Can't he see that? After making the effort, the first aperture of enlightenment concerning the mystery of Eliot Coldwell will open. Lyrics, concepts for songs and melodies will then flow, before he sweats for perfection on the acoustic project, like he did with the first album. He just has to make a start: the rest will follow.

'Breaky's done. Self-service you lazy arse,' Tom calls from the kitchen.

After shaking his unruly hair off his face he raises the first volume from the stack. It is heavy, bound in worn leather, and frayed around the front cover. Gold lettering on the spine has faded and the spine crunches when he opens it to the title page. He sees the title:
Benandanti
, and the author's name, Carlo Ginzburg. The print is small and the pages thin. It smells of his grandmother's bible, with the red dust mites that spin around the pages whenever it is opened. The thought of reading this one suggests migraines and a bleeding nose.

Tittering to himself, he places it on the unreadable pile and picks up a slimmer volume, written by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Isn't he an actor? Dante puts it beside his left knee to start a pile for more accessible volumes.

The next one is titled
Historia Naturalis Curiosa Regni Poloniae
, authored by a P Gabriel Rzacynski. Without delay, he shuffles it behind him. His swiftly rummaging hands uncover something by Voltaire, titled
Questions sur l'Encyclopédie
, but on opening the volume he finds it to have been printed in French, so it also finds a home on the unreadable pile. Does Eliot think he understands French?

And the next one follows suit – incredibly old and held together by thick rubber bands:
Lettres juives
, by the Marquis Boyer d'Argens and printed in 1737. Dante carefully places this one on the coffee table, frightened to even have such a delicate thing in his hands. After glancing across the other spines, the dull knot of futility expands behind his eyes. There is Leventhal, Gallini, Goulemot, and something called the
Gnoptik Fragment
with no author cited. Eliot called this 'the first batch', but even the ones he can read will consume at least a month of concentrated effort.

He can see the reason: Eliot wants him to read the influential works of other scholars, dilettantes and explorers of the unknown – men who inspired his longing for change and adventure. But these titles seem especially archaic and obscure. None of them is even cited in
Banquet
. Perhaps it is a test, or an academic exercise to induce the right state of mind in the man selected to assist Eliot's biographical second book. Nonetheless, he expected handwritten journals, old photographs, press cuttings and stories told around open fires – things more vivid and immediate. Eliot only ever published
Banquet for the Damned
, creating an overnight sensation in 1956 before a scathing critical backlash saw it out of mainstream print. And no one is more familiar with the book than he, but Eliot dismissed it and made him feel stupid, maybe even a little resentful. And why was Eliot so vague about the new project? Does he not trust him? They'll never get started if this reading list is merely the beginning of what he has to pore over. If only there were a faster way to catch up. But who is he to argue with Eliot Coldwell? Every book will have to be read, carefully. If he hadn't been invited to Scotland and provided with the flat, he'd be tempted to suspect delaying tactics on Eliot's part.

Dante shakes the notion from his head, wondering if his ingratitude can be measured.

Gentle strokes of a plectrum against the strings of an acoustic guitar slip beneath the door of Tom's room, and become a distraction before he's finished a cursory flick through the Richard Burton tome. As his eyes stare down at a yellowing page of cramped text, he imagines the onyx neck of Tom's guitar cradled between his friend's supple brown fingers. Instinctively, he wants to rush through and play the rhythm to the seductive lead. It is the arpeggio for
Black Wine
he can hear. A bluesy ballad from Sister Morphine's first album, with a dreamy country quality throughout the chorus, evoked by Tom's winsome harmonising and slide guitar. Tom is singing now, in a hushed tone, and the song sounds especially sad as it drifts through the flat.

They wrote that song together, huddled around the electric fire in Dante's room in their house in Northfield: he, Tom, Punky the drummer, and Anneka, the last bass player. Sprawled between overflowing ashtrays, and huddled around an empty Jack Daniel's bottle, the song came to them like a gift. Dante remembers how they looked in the flickering light from the four black candles that some Goth girl had given Tom after a fling: lank hair and gaunt faces; silk shirts hanging over ribs with too much definition; a blue-grey pallor to their skin in the dim light; flesh unused to sunlight. Rock'n'roll orphans lost to melody, legs clad tight in leather, drunk and stoned, but absorbed in the song someone began in D. Content together.

A bit of speed, coke if it floated for free, and plenty of skunk to help them along in those days. Time never mattered and neither did poverty, an empty fridge or signing on in Selly Oak. Everything seemed easier back then, with something special pulsing between them, whispering that it could go on forever.

Dante sighs and decides he will read the books, as much as he is able. After all he loves to read novels. But not today, with the sun out and the town to explore on a late summer's day. Eliot will understand; he and Tom need to settle in. The dusty minutiae of occult histories can wait.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

'Leather jeans. What were we thinking?' Dante says. 'What kind of impression are we going to make?'

'The right one,' Tom replies, casually. With his fingertips he pinches the black silk shirt off his collar bones and stares down his body, his face lit with pride. The untucked shirt sways over the belt buckle that supports his skin-tight leather jeans. Tossing the unruly mane of hair from off his face, he says, 'What is this, a fuckin' costume?'

Dante shakes his head and sucks on a cigarette. There is no point in arguing – Tom went to his own mother's funeral in jeans and then dressed in brown leather trousers to watch Beechey, a friend of theirs who leaped to his death from a block of council flats, laid to rest. He would not change for anyone and people were never offended by Tom's clothes; he added a chic touch to anything frayed, faded, or torn. With his easy gait, his height, and the chiselled face enhanced by his raven hair, he should have been a model when the agencies were recruiting long-haired men, but it was too much of an effort for Tom, and the thought of going to a gym had appalled.

It is nine o'clock and still light. Dusk washes above the town in a dark-blue skyscape, mingling its lofty depths with purple and black streaks of cloud – a science fiction sky, Dante muses, with the stars almost airbrushed between the drifting vapours. The kind of sky you see on the covers of Prog Rock albums. He likes that about Scotland. You get those skies up here.

Turning from the silent Scores, they enter the rear lawn of the Quad through a garden gate, and emerge behind the immensity of St Salvator's College. As they marvel at the multitude of broad windows, the path leads them between large glass globes of white light, mounted upon black iron posts. The lawn they circle has been mown as flat and perfect as an English bowling green and is bordered by high walls thick with ivy. It separates the Quad from the Scores, and only the higher gables and turrets of the other colleges are visible over the wall. Following the path, they walk beneath a small arch into the Quad proper. St Salvator's tall square tower, with its red clock face, stands opposite them with an arch at either end. Parallel fifteenth century halls run down from the chapel, all lit from within to cast an amber glow over the paths and darkened central lawn of the court, of which Lower College Hall provides the base, completing the square.

'This is it,' Dante says, turning to survey the front of the palatial building. They walk toward the stone staircase, which narrows as it rises to the large wooden doors – now open to welcome the cool night air and guests. Dante and Tom drop their cigarettes, grind them out beneath the soles of their polished biker boots, and then kick the little flat butts under a holly bush.

'You know,' Tom says, his grinning mouth signalling the approach of raucous laughter, 'it's gonna go like really quiet when we walk in. Everybody is going to stop talking and then turn around to look at us. All of these professors and their uppity wives.'

'Stop it. I'm bricking myself as it is,' Dante says, but he too feels the first tremor of hysterics.

'Man, I'm going to lose it in there, I swear,' Tom says, his shoulders already twitching.

'No you're not,' Dante warns, his whole body stricken with fear, and his mind now conjuring a picture of them both racing back out of the Orientation, laughing, with tears on their cheeks. When one of them becomes possessed with hysterics, the other inevitably joins in; it has been the same since school. He hesitates at the foot of the staircase, not daring to catch Tom's eye. The caution is unnecessary; Tom skips up the stairs and disappears through the doors. Dante is compelled to follow.

Resplendent with a high ceiling, the long walls of the hall are covered in vast oil paintings housed in ornate rectangular frames, featuring dignitaries from the university's long past, all assuming gigantic poses. They glare from under powdered wigs or push their chests out, invariably clad in black, with massive pink faces and white eyebrows beneath imperious foreheads. A long table, covered in a white cloth, has been erected on the left side of the hall and twinkles with a hundred glasses. Between the glasses, a host of platters is filled with food.

Several of the guests, dressed in formal attire, but not black tie, turn and look at Tom and Dante. Their eyes do not linger for long. Dante feels his chest tighten and his leather trousers set like concrete around his legs. 'Come on, let's find Eliot,' he says to Tom, who is making eyes at the food and drink.

Dante steers himself through the centre of the crowd, which is predominately male and middle-aged. He looks around for Eliot, ever anxious to avoid the occasional pair of curious eyes that turns toward him. After he passes through the main body of the gathering, he checks the seats lined against the walls by the small round tables at the head of the room, where people sit and eat. Tom is no longer behind him, lured away, no doubt, by the promise of food. Then he sees Janice, from the School of Divinity, on his left, and he smiles at her. The smile is not returned. She twists her pale neck and whispers into the ear of the man on her right, his face distinguished by a long jaw. He immediately looks up at Dante, and stares right at him, his face unmoving, the intensity of his look only broken when he turns to mutter into Janice's ear.

She keeps her haughty face turned to Dante and continues to watch him as he back-pedals through the crowd. He knocks against a man clad in tweed, wearing a bow tie. He apologises, then flees to find Tom.

And as far as he can see, Eliot is not here. Maybe he is late, he hopes, holding back any paranoid musings about being stood up. The only eyes upon him are those of Janice and the tall, long-jawed man, now joined by a squat bald man in a three-piece suit. They have followed him through the crowd and seem content to hang back and stare.

Dante turns his back on them; there is no law against assisting Eliot and he's been invited to the party by a member of staff. He can think of nothing, besides his inappropriate clothes, capable of provoking such a reaction from three strangers. What is it in their eyes: disapproval or apprehension?

Before he can take another step toward the distant shape of Tom's sleek head, a hand falls on his shoulder from behind. Dante swivels about to find himself staring into the face of the fat man who previously stood with Janice and long-jaw. 'Hello there, I'm Arthur Spencer. Hebdomidar of the university. I hear you've been asked to attend to some important work. With Eliot. Eliot Coldwell.' The voice is pleasant and the large bald head gleams like an opaque marble. Confused, Dante accepts the hand, which is pudgy, pink and hairless. He shakes it gently, as if a firm handshake will bruise the man's scrubbed paw. But at least the eyes are friendly: small, blue, and enclosed by pink-rimmed eyelids and gingery lashes, the skin resembling uncooked pastry as they close and then tremble after a blink.

'Not exactly,' he replies, but likes the sound of what the man has suggested. 'I don't really know what my role will be. To help with research and things, I guess. While I put some of his ideas to my own music. Oh, sorry. I'm Dante. Up from the Midlands.'

'Well, I am afraid you will get little from him tonight, Dante. Eliot has failed to appear. It's a dreadful shame, you know,' he adds, with a gentle shake of his head, expressing pity as if Eliot were ill. 'But wait here and I shall get you a drink.' Arthur Spencer bustles to the refreshment table, pausing once to greet another member of the faculty congregation.

There is no way around it: Eliot has failed to show. It is a 'dreadful shame', the man said. What is he to make of this? What does he actually know about Eliot, beside the stories in
Banquet
and a handful of letters reiterating the individual's need for a purposeful vocation? Eliot loaded him down with books after a strained and sometimes spiky first meeting, and now he's been tailed since arriving at the party.

Arthur Spencer returns, holding two glasses of white wine, mincing his way on small nimble feet between elbows and heads thrown back to laugh at punchlines Dante has not heard and does not expect to understand even if he did. Arthur offers the glass. 'There you are, sir.'

'Cheers.' Despite his dismay, there is something he wants to like about the Hebdomidar. Besides a couple of shopkeepers who sold them cigarettes, this is the first friendly face he's encountered in St Andrews. He forces himself to remember the man's surname. 'Mr Spencer?'

'Arthur, please,' the Hebdomidar says.

He gulps the Chardonnay down and relaxes. 'You said it was a dreadful shame?'

Arthur takes a breath, cocks his head to one side, makes an attempt to speak and then stops.

'What?'

'Well, how well do you know Eliot?'

He welcomes the inquiry; it gives him the opportunity to seek reassurance.

'I met him a couple of days ago, for the first time, and he was all right then.'

Arthur smiles, and nods at what sounds like a familiar story. 'So the research, and this talk of his book. How did this come about?'

'
Banquet for the Damned
is my favourite book. Our next album will be a conceptual record about it. And I've been writing to Eliot, on and off, for a year. A few weeks ago, he suggested I become his research assistant. To help with his second book, so I jumped at the chance. To meet him more than anything. And it'll help our music. You know, being close. It's an acoustic project.'

'Really,' Arthur says, frowning. 'You mean to say you never met the man before? Extraordinary.'

'Yeah, never even spoke to him on the phone. Maybe I should have done, before he went and arranged our accommodation and everything.'

There is a perceptible hardening of the man's features after his mention of accommodation. 'We?' he asks.

'My friend, Tom, came too. He's the guitarist in the band.'

'I see. And you had no, how shall I put it, no prior knowledge of Eliot other than his book and the letters?'

'That's right. But don't look so surprised, we were desperate to get out of Birmingham. It turned into quite an adventure, with that arm on the beach and everything.' Dante wants to continue and tell Arthur about the scream, but the man becomes immediately uncomfortable at his mention of the arm. There is an awkward silence, until Arthur ends it. 'You are a writer?'

'No. Besides lyrics for songs, if that counts.'

'But Eliot has a publisher for the second book?'

'I don't know. Maybe he'll write it first and then, you know, look around.'

'Look around, of course.' Arthur seems to deflate with relief. Then his face adopts a quizzical expression. 'Do you think a publisher will be receptive to a book by Eliot?'

Dante nods. 'Of course.
Banquet
is a classic. It's a crime it's still out of print. But things do come back and what Eliot said is important.

Although,' Dante adds sheepishly, 'you might not think so.'

'On the contrary. It's a fine read. Although I haven't perused it for years. A little unsavoury in parts I fear, and there are far healthier ways to achieve enlightenment than experimenting with the black arts.'

'I see that as just a metaphor, for raising your consciousness. You know, like with poetry or meditation.'

The man nods, studying him for a time before speaking in the tone of a confidant. 'Well Dante, it may surprise you, but I have known Eliot for practically all of my adult life. We were at Oxford together.'

'I envy you that,' Dante says, out of his depth again.

'He has always been a good friend. But . . . and this might be hard for you to digest, particularly after coming so far, Eliot is not the man he was.'

Dante holds his breath.

'I can see confusion in you already, Dante, despite your admiration for him. But there have been hard times in his life and it is best that you are made aware of certain facts. It's only fair that I put you in the picture. He has problems. Serious problems. He is subject to embarrassing digressions and, well, some quite abnormal behaviour. You see, I doubt whether he's capable of writing the book.'

Arthur sighs. 'This is so hard. I find it so touching that his book has been such a positive influence on a young man, and on a musician too. But Eliot has been unwell recently. You could say he never really recovered from an unconventional youth. And to be absolutely honest, and you deserve nothing less, it was his travelling and certain episodes that
Banquet
was based upon that began his illness.' He emphasises the word 'illness', and raises his eyebrows as if to impart a further cryptic embellishment.

'But don't take this the wrong way, Dante. He was once a force to be reckoned with, and made an excellent contribution to his faculty.

But that was some time ago.' The man's voice softens. 'I tell you this in confidence. There are alcohol problems. And I'd hazard a guess that Eliot needs to attend to his personal problems now. Rather than launching into a new project. It's all quite serious, I'm afraid to say.'

'I don't believe this,' Dante mutters. 'It can't be right.'

'I know it must be difficult for you.'

'But the other day he was fine. I mean he was lucid and clever and –'