Hearing secret harmonies (2 page)

‘How did he come to be christened Scorp?’ I asked.

‘Short for Scorpio, his Zodiac sign.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Blanche says attractive, but spooky.’

At this point Hugo showed unexpected knowledge.

‘I didn’t know Fiona’s latest was Scorpio Murtlock. I’ve never met him, but I used to hear about him several years ago, when he was working in the antique business. Two fellow antique dealers told me they had engaged a very charming young assistant.’

Norah was not prepared for Hugo to take over entirely in the Murtlock field.

‘Blanchie says he has a creepy side too.’

‘You can be creepy and attractive. There are different forms of creepiness, just as there are different forms of attractiveness.’

‘The antique dealers are presumably queers?’

‘Even so, that’s hardly the point. Murtlock made himself immensely useful in the business – which ranges from garden furniture to vintage cars – so useful that the owners suddenly found they were being relegated to a back place themselves. Murtlock was slowly but surely elbowing them out.’

‘Did their passion remain unsatisfied?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Unlike you, Hugo, not to be sure about that sort of thing.’

‘One of them implied he’d brought off something. That was not the rather nervy one. The nervy one complained he had begun to feel like a man bewitched. Those were his own words. The unnervy one agreed after a while that there was something uncomfortable about Murtlock. They were wondering how best to solve their problem, when Murtlock himself gave notice. He’d found someone more profitable to work over. His new patron – a man of some age, even older than oneself, if that can be imagined – was apparently more interested in what Blanchie calls Murtlock’s spooky side than in his sex appeal. They met during some business deal.’

‘Murtlock doesn’t sound a particularly desirable friend for Fiona.’

‘Blanche says he makes her behave herself.’

‘Even so.’

‘Susan and Roddy are thankful for small mercies.’

‘Taking exercise, meditation, no alcohol, sound quite large ones.’

‘They sound to me like the good old Simple Life,’ said Hugo. ‘Still it’s a relief one won’t catch one’s foot in a hypodermic when next at Blanchie’s cottage.’

‘You always talk about your nephews and nieces in the way Aunt Molly used to talk about you,’ said Norah.

Hugo was not at all discomposed by the comparison.

‘And you, Norah dear – and you. Think how Aunt Molly used to go on about you and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. As a matter of fact, I quite agree I’ve turned into Aunt Molly. I’d noticed it myself. Old age might have transformed one into something much worse. Everybody liked her. I flatter myself I’m much what she’d have been had she remained unmarried.’

‘I shall begin to howl, Hugo, if you talk like that about poor Eleanor.’

The Norah Tolland/Eleanor Walpole-Wilson manage had not been revived after the war, their ways dividing, though they remained friends. Norah, never so fulfilled as during her years as driver in one of the women’s services, had taken a job with a small car-hire firm, where she continued to wear a peaked cap and khaki uniform. Later she became one of the directors of the business, which considerably enlarged itself in scope, Norah always remaining available to drive, especially if a long continental trip were promised. Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, for her part, securing a seat on the Urban District Council, became immersed in local politics. Of late years she had embarked on a close relationship with a Swedish woman-doctor. Staying with this friend in Stockholm, Eleanor had been taken ill and died, bequeathing to Norah, with a small legacy, a pair of short-tempered pugs. Sensing mention of their former distress, this couple now began to rush about the flat, snuffling and barking.

‘Oh, shut up, pugs,’ said Norah.

The commendation accorded to Scorpio Murtlock – that he could keep Fiona in order – limited in compass, was not to be lightly regarded, if valid. It was reiterated by Blanche, when she rang up about the caravan party. Never very capable of painting word pictures, she was unable to add much additional information about Murtlock, nor did she know anything, beyond her name, of the girl Rusty. Barnabas Henderson, on the other hand, possessed certain conventional aspects, notably a father killed in the war, who had left enough money for his son to buy a partnership in a small picture-dealing business; a commercial venture abandoned to follow Murtlock into the wilderness.

Blanche’s assurance of comparatively austere behaviour – what Hugo called the good old Simple Life – had been to some extent borne out, on the arrival of Fiona and her friends, by refusal of all offers of food and drink. Provided with a bivouac under some trees, on the side of the field away from the house, they at once set about various minor tasks relative to settling in caravan and horses, behaviour that seemed to confirm the ascription of a severe standard of living. When, early in the afternoon, Isobel and I went to see how they were getting on, they had come to the end of these dispositions. Earlier negotiations about siting the caravan had been carried out with Fiona, Murtlock standing in silence with folded arms. Now he showed more sign of emerging as the strong personality he had been billed.

‘Is there anything you’d all like to do?’

Fiona had been addressed. Murtlock took it upon himself to answer.

‘Too late in the year to leap the fires.’

He spoke thoughtfully, without any touch of jocularity. This was evidently the line Blanche had denominated as spooky. Since we had agreed to put up the caravan, there was no reason, if kept within bounds, why Beltane should not be celebrated, or whatever it was he had in mind.

‘We could make a bonfire.’

‘Too near the solstice.’

‘Something else then?’

‘A sacrifice.’

‘What sort?’

‘One in Harmony.’

‘Like Fiona’s shirt?’

‘Yes.’

He did not laugh. He did not even smile. This affirmative somehow inhibited further comment in a frivolous tone, imposing acquiescence in not treating things lightly, even Fiona’s shirt. At the same time I was uncertain whether he was not simply teasing. On the face of it teasing seemed much more likely than all this assumed gravity. Nevertheless uncertainty remained, ambivalence of manner leaving one guessing. No doubt that was intended, after all a fairly well recognized method of establishing one sort of supremacy. The expressed aim – that things should be in Harmony – could not in itself be regarded as objectionable. It supported the contention that Fiona’s latest set of friends held to stringent moral values of one sort or another. How best to achieve an act of Harmony was another matter.

‘Harmony is not easy to define.’

‘Harmony is Power – Power is Harmony.’

‘That’s how you see it?’

‘That’s how it is.’

He smiled. When Murtlock smiled the charm was revealed. He was a boy again, making a joke, not a fanatical young mystic. At the same time he was a boy with whom it was better to remain on one’s guard.

‘How are we going to bring off an act of Harmony on a Saturday afternoon?’

‘Through the Elements.’

‘What elements?’

‘Fire, Air, Earth, Water.’

The question had been a foolish one. He smiled again. We discussed various possibilities, none of them very sparkling. The other three were silent throughout all this. Murtlock seemed to have transformed them into mere shadows of himself.

‘Is there water near here? I think so. There is the feel of water.’

‘A largish pond within walking distance.’

‘We could make a water sacrifice.’

‘Drown somebody?’

He did not answer.

‘We could go crayfishing,’ said Isobel.

Since demands made by improvisation at a moment’s notice of the necessary tackle for this sport were relatively onerous, the proposal marked out Isobel, too, as not entirely uninfluenced by Murtlock’s spell.

‘The crayfish are in the pond?’

‘In the pools of the brook that runs out of it.’

He considered.

‘It can’t be exactly described as a blood sport,’ I added.

I don’t know why inserting that lame qualification seemed required, except that prejudice against blood sports could easily accord with an outlook to be inferred from people dressed in their particular style. If asked to rationalize the comment, that would have been my pretext. Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon’s programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell? Harmony was also Power, he said. Power would be exercised over crayfish, if caught, but possibly the wrong sort of Power. He pretended to be puzzled.

‘You mean that without blood there is no vehicle for the spirit?’

‘I mean that you might not like killing.’

‘I do not kill, if not killed.’

He seemed glad to have an opportunity to make that statement, gnomic to say the least. It sounded like a favourite apophthegm of a luminary of the cult to which they all belonged, the familiar ring of Shortcuts to the Infinite, Wisdom of the East, Analects of the Sages. For some reason the pronouncement seemed also one recently brought to notice. Had I read it not long before in print? The Murtlock standpoint, his domination over Fiona and the others, was becoming a little clearer in a certain sense, if remaining obscure in many others.

‘I don’t think we’ll be killed. Deaths crayfishing are comparatively rare.’

‘You spoke not of death, but of killing.’

‘The latter is surely apt to lead to the former?’

‘There is killing – death is an illusion.’

This was no help so far as deciding how the afternoon was to be spent.

‘The point is whether or not you would consider the killing of crayfish to be in Harmony?’

Once more his smile made me feel that it was I, rather than he, who was being silly.

‘Not all killing is opposed to Harmony.’

‘Let’s kill crayfish then.’

The odd thing was that he managed never to be exactly discourteous, nor even embarrassing, when he talked in this way. It was always close to a joke, though a joke not quite brought to birth. At least you did not laugh. You accepted on its own merits what he said, unintelligible or the reverse. I wondered – had not some forty years stretched between us – whether, as a contemporary, I should have been friends with Scorpio Murtlock. Indications were at best doubtful. That negative surmise was uninfluenced by his manner of talking, mystic and imperative, still less the style of dress. Both might have been acceptable at that age in a contemporary. In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot be properly equated. So far as they could be equated, the obstacles set up against getting on with Murtlock were in themselves negligible.

The objection to him, if objection there were, was the sense that he brought of something ominous. He would have been ominous – perhaps more ominous – in a City suit, the ominous side of him positively mitigated by a blue robe. His accents, liturgical, enigmatic, were also consciously rough, uncultivated. The roughness was imitated by Fiona and Henderson, when they remembered to do so. Rusty never uttered. No doubt Murtlock’s chief attraction was owed to this ominousness, something more sexually persuasive than good looks, spectacular trappings, even sententious observations. Certainly Fiona was showing an altogether uncharacteristic docility in allowing, without any sign of dispute or passive disapproval, someone else to make all the going. It might be assumed that she and Rusty were ‘in love’ with Murtlock. Probably Henderson shared that passion. Murtlock himself showed no sign of being emotionally drawn to any of them. In the light of what had been reported, it would have been surprising had he done so.

‘What do we need?’

He spoke this time in a tone of practical enquiry.

‘A circle of wire mesh kept together by a piece of iron. Something like the rim of an old saucepan or fryingpan does well.’

‘The circle, figure of perfection – iron, abhorred by demons.’

‘Those aspects may help too.’

‘They will.’

‘Then a piece of preferably rotting meat.’

‘Nothing far different from a sacrifice for a summoning.’

‘In this case summoning crayfish.’

‘Crayfish our sacrifice, rather.’

The requirements took a little time to get into order. A morsel of doubtful freshness was found among bones set aside for stock. The four of them joined in these preparations usefully, shaping the wire-netting, measuring out cords, fixing the tainted bait. When the trap was assembled Murtlock swung it gently through the air. Even in undertaking this trial of weight, which showed grasp of the sport, there was something of the swaying of a priest’s censer.

‘And now?’

‘The crayfish beds, such as they are, lie about a quarter of a mile away.’

The brook flowed through fields of poorish pasture, tangled with undergrowth as they sloped down more steeply to the line of the stream. Once the trap was slung among its stones Murtlock seemed satisfied. If the others were bored, they did not dare show it during the long period when there was no sign of a catch. Conversation altogether flagged. Murtlock himself possessed to a marked degree that characteristic – perhaps owing something to hypnotic powers – which attaches to certain individuals; an ability to impose on others present the duty of gratifying his own whims. It seemed to matter that Murtlock should get what he wanted – in this case crayfish – while, if the others were bored, that was their affair. No particular obligation was laid on oneself to prevent it. When at last the circle of iron showed signs of possessing the supposedly magical properties he had attributed, four crayfish caught, this modest final success, obviously pleasing to Murtlock, was for some reason exceptionally pleasing to oneself too. By then afternoon was turning to evening. Again he took the initiative.