MASQUES OF SATAN (30 page)

Cyprian, when he came, continued to communicate entirely in whispers through his mother. He drew prolifically and with intense concentration, always those vast, chaotic structures. They resembled no building I had ever seen: there was something organic about them, as if they had generated their own increase like huge fungoid growths. I noticed, though, that he never drew any human figures to inhabit their spaces, and once I asked him why. The answer, communicated as usual via Midge, was that people made noises, and he didn’t like noisy buildings.

During this time, which must have lasted about four weeks, I did not keep in touch with Aunt Dora. I was, I suppose, ashamed to, but it was cruel of me. Eventually, one day she rang me up to reprove me for not coming to her last monthly ‘At Home’. I immediately arranged to go to tea with her the following Sunday.

I was shocked by the difference that I saw in her. She was pale and haggard. Her mouth was slightly twisted on the left side, which I guessed to be a recurrence of the Bell’s Palsy that she had suffered from a year or so before. I was very apologetic about not having visited her.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you’ve had your own problems, haven’t you? I must say, it is rather galling for a benevolent old party like me, after all those nice girls I’ve found for you over the years whom you’ve turned down out of hand. And then you have to take up with that thundering nuisance Midge Black. Ah, well! Human nature is naturally perverse, as Anton used to say.’ She seemed more amused than annoyed.

‘How did you know?’

‘Oh, she rang me up and told me, of course.’

‘But I thought you’d slammed down the phone on her.’

‘That girl is like a force of nature. She cannot be resisted. Well, I don’t have to tell you that, do I? I expect the sex is exciting, though,’ she added, glancing up at me with a little smile on her lips. She could say the most shocking things sometimes, in the most genteel way. It was a calculated strategy for maintaining the element of surprise: as important to her life as to her books. I nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we don’t need to go into details. More tea?’

This was more like the old Aunt Dora I knew and loved. Nevertheless, her appearance showed beyond doubt that she was under severe strain. I asked if she had been seeing Mr. Fand.

‘Yes. You may as well know. I had to find out if this Anton business was genuine.’

‘Did he come through?’

‘Well, not exactly. Apparently he couldn’t handle the etheric voice-box thing himself, so he relayed the messages via Rudolph Valentino, as before. But it was Anton. I’m sure of it, Geoffrey, so we’re not going to argue about that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You remember I told you about Hetty. There was a problem in my mind about Hetty, because she was stillborn, so how could she be there in any real sense in the afterlife? Well, the Hetty wasn’t her, it turns out. It was another Hetty. I won’t go into details, but there was something I had forgotten, or had made myself forget. Now, you can’t possibly say Fand knew about it, because nobody did except me, and I had wiped it from my mind. In the last years of his life, before he became so ill he couldn’t do anything, Anton worked with a new accompanist. She was an attractive girl, and I think very talented, and he did his last two or three concert tours with her. Her name was . . . I can’t remember her name but for some reason Anton always called her Hetty. That was not her name. No. But it was what he called her. I think it was the most unhappy period of my entire life, that time before he became so ill that he had to stop the concerts. Then I took over. He was here at home. I dropped everything: the writing, everything. We were closer than we’d ever been in those last months. But now it appears this Hetty is there with him.’ Her voice began to shake so much she could barely make herself understood. ‘What are they doing to me?’

I told Aunt Dora that she must try to forget this — I stopped myself from using the word ‘nonsense’ — and that she should never see Fand again.

‘I can’t stop now,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. My life has been completely turned upside down by this.’

‘All the more reason why you should never see Fand again.’

I can’t remember how the conversation ended. It probably just disintegrated, as these things do, but I know the issue was unresolved between us. As for me, I had made up my mind that I had to see Fand immediately. The need had been growing long before the interview with my Aunt, because of Midge, who was always saying that I should ‘do something’ about Fand. This was my opportunity. I almost felt proud of my unusual decisiveness: I even began rehearsing in my mind how I should tell Midge about the encounter.

When I left my Aunt that afternoon I walked down Larch Avenue and knocked on Mr Fand’s door. It was about half-past five on a light, pleasant July evening. The sun had a long way to go before it sank into the West.

Carl opened the door. He remembered who I was, and I told him that I wished to see Mr. Fand. When Carl replied that he was not available and could I come back another time, I said I would wait there in his hall until he was. Carl hesitated only a few moments before admitting defeat.

‘Please yourself,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to wait till he’s through.’ Carl pointed towards the dining room door. ‘He’s relaxing at the moment in there, watching one of the old silents. It’s a favourite silent of his.
The Lodger
, directed by Hitchock with Ivor Novello. It’s the one where they think he’s Jack the Ripper, but in the end he isn’t.’

‘It sounds unlikely.’

‘What?’

‘Ivor Novello being Jack the Ripper.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Carl gave me a pale smile. ‘It helps to relax him, but I wish he’d get out sometimes and take some exercise. He says he doesn’t like outdoors. That’s all very well but he’s got a dicky heart. He won’t eat proper healthy food, either. “Give me a good old, fry-up,” he says. He loves his fry-ups. I said to him: “What would you say to a nice bit of steamed fish?” He said: “I’d say, ‘bugger off, steamed fish.’” That’s all very well, but you’ve got to look after yourself if you’ve got a dicky heart, I keep telling him. Well, this won’t get the ironing done, standing here passing the time of day. I’m just going out into the garden to see how my courgettes are getting on. That’s my relaxation, the garden, so that’s where I’ll be if his lordship should come out hollering for his tea. It’s all too much for a white woman. I could be in the chorus of
Phantom of the Opera
, you know. I was offered the chance. Passed the audition with flying colours: tap, singing, the lot. I turned it down.
He
didn’t want it. The things we do for love. You don’t mind waiting for him in the hallway here? That chair is more comfortable than it looks. I like my bit of garden. I’ve got green fingers, see. It’s my personal little bit of a spiritual gift, you might say. Well, tatty bye!’ And he walked down the corridor to the back garden.

I sat in the hall, rehearsing my speech to Mr Fand, listening to the faint clatter of the silent film projector through the dining room door. Once or twice I thought I heard another sound from behind the same barrier, a kind of incoherent moaning or singing, but it was very faint, possibly illusory. Then the clattering stopped and, after a minute or so, Fand emerged from the dining room rubbing his hands. He was neatly attired as usual in his double-breasted suit. When he saw me he looked irritated but not surprised.

‘Well, if it isn’t Mr Philosopher. What brings you here, as if I didn’t know?’ I explained that I wanted a brief word with him. He barely looked at me. ‘Hmm. I suppose Carl is still pratting about in his little vegetable patch?’ I nodded. ‘All right, Mr Philosopher, I’ll give you five minutes of my valuable time. In there.’

He indicated a door on the other side of the hall, opposite the dining room. Ahead of him I entered a small, crowded study, crammed with books, papers, and recording equipment. Rows of white boxes containing tapes lined the walls on shelves, each box labelled in black marker pen with a date, and sometimes a name: THEDA BARA, GANDHI, CONFUCIUS, LIBERACE, and many others.

Fand sat down in a swivel chair by the desk and waved me to the only other seat in the room. He settled his reptilian glance on my face while I laboriously explained that my Aunt was not well and was under great strain through attending his séances. I tried to steer a firm course between aggression and submissiveness, but I could tell almost at once that I was having no effect.

‘What am I supposed to do about it?’ he said at the end of the recital.

I suggested that if he himself discouraged her from attending the séances it might be of help. He did not so much refuse as fail to understand that such a thing was possible. I began to console myself feebly with the fact that I had ‘said my piece’
.

‘Anything else you want to air with me while you’re here, Mr Philosopher?’

I could not have gone without mentioning Midge’s grievances, so I did. Fand laughed.

‘So that is what it’s all about! You’re screwing her, aren’t you? Don’t deny it. I know. I know a lot of things you don’t know and won’t never know. I have been given powers that are beyond your tiny mind. You people make me sick. You come in here with your college educations and your lah-di-dah accents, and you think you can tell me what to do. I’ve had scientists in here, the lot. I’ve been wired up. They think they can prove I’m some sort of fake, or something. Shall I tell you what they’ve proved? Sod all. They’re nothing but a useless lot of stuck-up nobodies. And what about you? Call yourself a philosopher, and you’re bedding that mad bitch mother of a moron, and believing every word she says. Call yourself a philosopher? You couldn’t philosophise your way out of a paper bag full of old orange peel. You people make me sick.’

I had had enough. I left. When, the following day, I gave Midge an edited version of my encounter with Fand, she said: ‘Well, I didn’t expect you’d do anything to help me — and you haven’t.’ We were in the Shalimar Curry House at the time. Cyprian was working his way methodically through a prawn byriani, and paying, as usual, no attention to our conversation. It was our last. When the meal was over Midge and Cyprian left the restaurant, and I have never seen them since, except perhaps once, at a distance.

V

The excuse I gave myself for not seeing Aunt Dora during the next weeks was that I was marking final examination papers for the university. It was a good excuse, as excuses go, but I still felt guilty when Sir Harvey Tarrant rang up one morning to tell me that Aunt Dora had had an attack of some sort — a stroke, with complications, it was thought — and was in the Whittington Hospital.

When I arrived there Sir Harvey was waiting for me and we went together to see her in Intensive Care. She wore an oxygen mask and was on a morphine drip. She appeared to be drifting in and out of consciousness; that is, consciousness of us, because I had the impression that most of the time she was intent upon some purpose in another part of herself. Once she recovered enough to recognise us, and said faintly that there was no need for us to ‘wait around’. In the event, we did not have long to wait. About two hours later her breathing became longer, then slowed to a halt. When the moment came I could think of nothing, and almost feel nothing. Some stupid words to a stupid tune kept turning in my head: ‘Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far?’

Sir Harvey Tarrant broke in on my emptiness. ‘It was that swine who did it, you know,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Fand, of course. She’d just been to see him before she had the attack.’

Suddenly my head was full again, this time of rage and hatred. The venom that Midge had injected into me was taking effect at last. I longed to get out of the hospital into the cool air, but I restrained myself. It was about five in the afternoon before the formalities had been gone through, and Sir Harvey and I had taken leave of one another.

Outside the Whittington the weather was appallingly bright and hot. I wanted to walk and walk. I set off in the rough direction of Highgate Hill.  About an hour later I found myself walking down Larch Avenue towards Aunt Dora’s house. To my surprise the front door was open, so I went in.

Something was not right about the entrance hall. For a few moments I was filled with terror, until I realised I had made a simple mistake. I had come in to the wrong house, similar in outward appearance, but two doors down from Aunt Dora’s. It was Fand’s. From the back of the house I could hear the faint snoring of a motor mower. I went into the séance room and saw, through the French windows, Carl pushing his mower to and fro across the back lawn in the sunlight. He seemed happy; I would not disturb him. I went back into the front hall, and was about to leave when I heard a faint clatter from beyond the door to my right. It was the sound of Fand watching one of his damned silents.