The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (22 page)

Hermia invited me in. I noticed that she was filling their little house, as she had mine, with imported ethnicity. Batiques and Moroccan rugs adorned the walls; the fashionable colours of the soukh—oatmeal, blood red and ochre—dominated. She still had a taste for those nasty little cushions covered in heavy gold thread with sequin mirrors sewn into the fabric. That made me smile. What finally reconciled me to Hermia’s departure had been the thought that I would never have to have another badly stuffed, scintillating lump of pseudo-primitivism biting into my back as I sat on the sofa watching television.

Hermia is a big woman, not fat, but big. Her features are big too: big nose, big feet, big hair. That hair, which had once been described by a friend of mine as ‘looking like dark diarrhoea’ was now tinged with grey. She still wore it in a great untidy frizz around her long face, a sort of Satanic halo, or periwig. I had never liked frizzy hair, but curiously Hermia’s had been one of the things that had drawn me to her, Eros having a strange habit of reversing the poles of attraction and repulsion. Besides, I had always entertained the quite irrational prejudice that frizzy-haired women were more sexually eager than their lank-locked sisters. In the case of Hermia my prejudice had been fully and rather unpleasantly confirmed.

She offered me a glass of wine which I refused. There was a strange silence in which for a moment I completely forgot what I had come for. Hermia gave me a troubled look.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You look awful. Poor old Henry!’

The next moment she was embracing me. Her coarse hair scoured my cheek and I smelt her familiar perfume, a peculiar musky odour. I remember that it had recommended itself to her because the manufacturers boasted that no animals had been tortured to bring it into being; only, they might have added, as a result of its being worn. I disengaged myself gently. The wiry scrape of her hair had reminded me of what I was here for.

I told her plainly that her husband had somehow got hold of my research on Ovenstone, that he was trying to sabotage my work. I told her that I knew what his game was and that he would not get away with it. Her response was to put on an elaborate pantomime of astonishment and incredulity.

I said: ‘Just tell Dan I know.’

‘Henry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you like some herb tea?’

‘No!’

‘You really ought to get some help, Henry,’ she said, assuming a concerned face. How typical of her. For Hermia the compassionate gesture had always been a more than adequate substitute for compassion itself. (Hence the awful musk!) I left.

**

The Constant Rake went into production. I travelled down for the first read-through, but it was thought better that I should not attend subsequent rehearsals in case I burdened the cast with too much academic background. I prepared some detailed programme notes and consoled myself with the thought that with the Rose Tree production at least I had stolen a march on Pring.

But even here he was plotting to bring me down. A week into rehearsals a letter arrived. The envelope had a crest (eagle with a viper in its beak) embossed on the flap and the letter itself was headed ‘From the Earl of Selgrave, Selgrave House, Arundale, W. Yorks.’ It read:

Dear Mr Bourne, [the proper address is Professor Bourne, but never mind, never mind!]

Will you please refrain from sending me any more notices of your play production. I cannot imagine why you should suppose that I have any interest whatsoever in the theatre. I have never heard of Mr Ovenstone; I have no idea who he is and I do not wish to know. Your constant bombardment of me with these wretched leaflets is becoming an actionable nuisance. If you do not cease forthwith I shall put the matter in the hands of my solicitors.

Selgrave

Was this a hoax? A brief consultation of the appropriate reference books revealed that the Earldom of Selgrave did still exist and that George James Mordern Sykes Daubeny tenth Baron Arundale seventeenth Earl of Selgrave (‘Recreations: Hunting, Bridge’) was the sixty-five year old descendent of Ovenstone’s despised patron. From Burke’s Peerage I learned that he was the last of his line and that there were no descendants, direct or collateral, to inherit the Earldom. Needless to say I had never sent any leaflets to the man, so I wrote him a letter categorically denying my having done so and delicately suggesting the name of the culprit, Pring. The reply to my letter did not come from the Earl but from his solicitors. In the tersest possible language they intimated that any further letters sent by me to Selgrave were to be regarded as an actionable nuisance, and the matter would be referred to the police.

I felt helpless in the face of this malice and conspiracy and did not know where to turn. But I have a certain vague belief in Providence which is often strangely justified. The evening I received the solicitor’s letter I picked up my little edition of
The Rake
(as I now affectionately called it) and began to leaf through it. Henry Ovenstone stared at me out of the engraving—his periwig a little looser than I had thought?—but the stare seemed to be companionable. I browsed my way idly through my favourite parts of the play and reread the Epilogue. Four lines from it which I had not noticed before impressed me for some reason:

The faults of Vice are Virtue’s surest shield

Oft Villainy’s by Villainy revealed

Rogues are conjoined by knots of foul Deceit

Unravel one, and here’s another Cheat!

I felt that the lines were intended for me, but what did they mean? I only had to wait twelve hours for the answer. It arrived by the next morning’s post in the shape of the
Journal of Theatre Studies
. I won’t bore you with an analysis of Pring’s lamentable article on Ovenstone. The quality of Pring’s writing may be amply demonstrated by two details: he referred to John Dryden as ‘Charles II’s Spin-Doctor’ and he misused the word ‘disinterested’. But the revelation came at the end of the article in the following acknowledgement: ‘I am greatly indebted to the generosity of the Earl of Selgrave, in allowing me to inspect the papers relating to Henry Ovenstone in his family archive.’

Ovenstone was right: there was a conspiracy.

**

Following people is a fascinating occupation; really, it is scholarship by other means. Selgrave has a small flat in Onslow Square which he occupies intermittently throughout the year. A bald, stooping, shambling apology for a man, he carries a stick and has a slight limp from a hunting accident. Having no immediate family and apparently few friends, he spends most evenings playing cards at his club, Boodles in St James’s, from which he emerges rather the worse for drink at around midnight and takes a taxi home. It is a worthless life.

You will be asking why I began to follow him. Well, a few weeks ago the production of
The Constant Rake
at the Rose Tree was cancelled. All kinds of reasons were given: sickness, tensions among the cast, artistic differences. Tom was most apologetic to me, but I could tell he was hiding something. Selgrave was at the bottom of it all, Selgrave and his lickspittle minion, Pring. So I knew what I had to do.

I bought a new suit, an Old Etonian tie and a haircut at Trumper’s. I followed Selgrave to Boodles and parked the car round the corner in Jermyn Street. When Selgrave emerged from the club near midnight and started to weave around in search of a taxi, I approached him from behind, pretending to be a fellow member of Boodles who had also just left the club. He was a little offhand with me at first, but when I offered to give him a lift in my car he greedily accepted. The tie had inspired confidence. We walked round into Jermyn Street which was fortunately deserted. As the Last of the Selgraves was bending down to get into my car I hit him hard from behind with a claw hammer.

The hammer and Lord Selgrave entered the Thames at a deserted spot not far from the Millennium Dome. Grey morning was tucking its fingers over the horizon when I stood on the grey, gritty strand. The water ran past smooth and swift, tiny waves lapped at my feet.

Then I saw a disturbance in the polish’d surface of the stream. Something was rising up from it. It must have come from deep beneath the river’s bed because great cloudes of black mud were discolouring the pale brown flowing water. Weeds too had sprung up from the bottom, like the weeds in my dream: steel and iron grey in long, corkscrew tendrils. They reared themselves above the surface and revealed themselves to be attached to a great grey head, scratched and lined as if marked by all the sorrowes of the Universe, but still known to me. It was my old friend Mr Ovenstone and he was coming out of the water to greet me, firstly his bewigged head, then all behind him a formless bulk of broadcloth soaked by the ages. His mouth opened and a great gush of water came from it, as water from the grey stone conch of a Triton in a fountaine. Heavily he crawled towards me, and, as he did so the waters from his mouth abated. Dawn wind caught and waved a few strands of his perruque as my friend spoke to me, at last face to face.

Posteritie, incline a gentle ear

Judge if you must but judge us with a teare.

Brand not our passions with too foul a name;

Pity at least what you are forced to blame.

Selgrave! thou stinking scion of an whore,

You bray to us from sluggish Lethe’s shore;

Together bounde, in this fell mortall motion

Let’s drift as one towards the Joyless Ocean.

FINIS

THE BLUE ROOM

There can be advantages to having a snob for a brother-in-law. Occasionally I meet people whom otherwise I would never have known and see places which otherwise I would only have experienced on a guided tour. Besides, my brother-in-law Robert is the most harmless kind of snob. He is what a friend of mine calls ‘a Duchess Worshipper’; he does not despise the working classes, he just loves a Lord.

For most of the week Robert is a very successful barrister in London, but at weekends he, my sister Pat and their two children go down to their cottage at Woolmington in Gloucestershire. I am frequently invited there as a guest, not so much for the charm of my company as because I can be a free child-minder to my nephew and niece. (There is an au-pair, naturally, but a spare hand is always useful.) Being an actor, I am frequently available; I am well fed and watered there; and my nephew and niece are, as children go, very easy to like.

Gloucestershire is where Robert and Pat do most of their serious socialising. I do not always accompany them on what, much to their annoyance, I call their ‘climbing expeditions’, but occasionally I do, which is how, about ten years ago now, I came to know Johnnie Buckland.

Johnnie lives at Swincombe, about six or seven miles from where Robert and Pat have their cottage. He is, in fact, Viscount Buckland, a courtesy title which he holds as eldest son of the Marquess of Harbourne, an elderly recluse who inhabits a vast Georgian pile up in the Derbyshire Dukeries. Swincombe, by contrast, though far from small, is not vast. It is an exquisite Jacobean mansion of honey-coloured Cotswold stone situated near the village of Swincombe on the slopes of the Cotswolds. You may have visited Swincombe House, but it is unlikely, because Johnnie only opens it up occasionally to the public, usually at the request of some earnest group of architectural or antique furniture enthusiasts. Johnnie also rents it out to film companies, and, as it happened, I had first been to Swincombe as an actor. I played Filmer Jesson in a television version of Pinero’s
His House in Order,
and Swincombe had been used to stand in for ‘Overbury Towers’, the ‘house’ in question.

When, a year after this, Robert somehow got to know Johnnie, he happened to mention to him that I had filmed at his house. (My brother-in-law will make use of anyone to establish a point of contact.) Now, Johnnie loves Swincombe as a father loves his child, and he hates it when a film company does not, as he perceives it, do justice to its beauties. As luck would have it, he thought very well of the way the BBC had handled the place in
His House in Order,
on the strength of which, Pat, Robert and I were invited over to lunch one Saturday in April. I remember how Robert had put a tender hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Making yourself useful at last, eh?’ This, in my experience, is about the nearest Robert has ever come to a joke.

When we had filmed at Swincombe Johnnie Buckland had been away, so this was the first time I had met him. He was then in his early forties and recently divorced with a six year old son who lived mostly with his mother. In this single state he had devised what very few of us can ever afford to devise, a lifestyle which suited him and him alone. Part of the week he spent at Swincombe managing the business of the estate, as he owned half of Swincombe village, as well as a good deal of agricultural land. The rest of the time he was in London researching in a desultory way for a book he was writing on the Great War. At weekends he would be sociable at Swincombe with friends coming down to stay and locals, such as us, being entertained to lunch or supper. He had a small staff but did a good deal of the cooking himself.

He was not unattractive, being slender and dark with an aquiline, Byronic countenance. The romantic cast of his appearance was enhanced by some eccentricities of dress. He almost always wore jeans, but had a penchant for fancy waistcoats and white shirts which he liked to wear with the collars turned up. Over this he usually had on a black jacket, possibly of his own design, almost knee length, slightly flared below the waist. I got the sense of someone by no means uncomfortable with life, but, for all his luxuries and liberties, unfulfilled, drifting. He was genial but there was something about him which balked at intimacy.

We arrived at Swincombe, as requested, just before midday so that he could show us round the house before lunch. His weekend guests, he told me, were due any minute. One activity he never seemed to tire of was showing people Swincombe, so all of us enjoyed the tour.

The charm of its well-mannered but idiosyncratic exterior is maintained within. The main rooms are spacious but not grandiose. The Jacobean coffered and pargetted ceilings are nicely complemented by Georgian door frames and panelling on the walls. The pictures are good, though not of the cleanest. Johnnie’s family appeared to favour decent portraitists of the second rank like Dance and Devis and Hoppner. There is some very fine Georgian furniture which, as in many such houses, exists in a state which might be described as ‘taken for granted’, somewhere between total neglect and loving care. We only saw the ground floor reception rooms because, before he could show us the upstairs bedrooms, his house guests arrived.

These consisted of a publisher and his wife who were considering renting the gate house—an architectural gem in itself—for weekends, and a seventy-year-old spinster cousin. One of Johnnie’s most attractive traits is the tenderness he feels for his many elderly relatives. The other guest was a girl in her twenties called ‘Piggy’ Wark-Winkworth, willowy and waif-like, with pale blonde hair that seemed perpetually to be falling into her eyes. Anyone less like a pig I never saw, but that was to be expected: aristocratic nicknames are deliberately designed to baffle the outside world. She belonged to a physical type, I subsequently discovered, that Johnnie favoured.

It was an informal gathering, so we ate in the kitchen because it was warm, spacious and convenient. It was a pleasant occasion. Both Robert and the publisher exuded the bonhomie of complacent success, and the elderly cousin, next to whom I sat, concealed beneath her placid, faded exterior a markedly original view of life. ‘Piggy’ said very little, but seemed content to sit and pick at her food and occasionally flick a pale tassel of hair out of her eyes. Pat and the publisher’s wife talked to each other about their children.

There was one feature of the meal which alerted me to our host’s deep vein of eccentricity: the table mats. They were, at first glance, of the conventional rectangular kind, made of laminated wood with green baize beneath and a pictorial upper side. However the scenes depicted on these mats were not the usual hunting or topographical prints, but erotic engravings of the most explicit nature, dating from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. No one remarked on them, but when Robert noticed his he let out a sharp, involuntary bark of laughter, his customary reaction to any profound embarrassment.

After lunch Johnnie proposed a walk. Behind the house was a level lawn and an oval lake, then the ground rose steeply to a ridge of the Cotswolds. On this slope could be seen the traces of an early eighteenth-century stone cascade. At the top of the cascade was a folly in the form of a circular colonnaded structure surmounted by an obelisk. Johnnie was in the slow—very slow—process of restoring this feature and he proposed that we should inspect progress.

Johnnie likes to walk quickly, as I do, so we soon became separated from the rest of the party who were dawdling and chatting in the spring sunshine. For a while Johnnie and I climbed up towards the folly in silence. At length I felt it was necessary to say something and so, because I am interested in such things, I asked him if Swincombe was haunted.

After a pause Johnny said: ‘No. Not really. But there is the Blue Room.’

‘What is the Blue Room?’

‘One of the bedrooms in the south wing. It has an effect on people.’

‘What sort of an effect?’

‘Sexual mainly.’

I pressed him for further details which he seemed at first reluctant to impart. Eventually he revealed that anyone sleeping in the Blue Room, male or female, was liable to be consumed, particularly in the early hours of the morning, with an all but overwhelming desire for sex.

‘Or so they say,’ he added, but I could tell that for some reason he was back-peddling. ‘It’s only a sort of legend. There was this ancestor of mine who lived here in the early seventeenth century. Black Jack Stanway, he was called, and he built most of Swincombe as it stands today. (Baron Stanway is one of my courtesy titles incidentally, but we never use it.) Well, according to the legend, in about 1630 Black Jack saved some shady character from being burned alive at Evesham for witchcraft. In those days a title really counted for something. So, as a return favour, they say this magician chappie put a spell on the Blue Room so that any lady sleeping in it would be so aroused between the hours of twelve and three that she would submit willingly to Black Jack’s advances.’

‘And did he take full advantage?’

‘History alas does not record, except to say that he died in that bedroom.’

‘In the arms of a wench?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Has the Blue Room been tested since?’

‘Well,’ said Johnnie. ‘Here we are at the folly.’ And as, by then, the rest of the party had caught up with us, discussion of the Blue Room was abandoned.

On our return from the folly Johnnie’s housekeeper, Mrs Maxton, served tea in the Long Drawing Room. While the others were milling around Johnnie drew me aside and pointed to a dingy half-length portrait by Daniel Mytens dating from 1628.

‘That’s Black Jack Stanway,’ he said.

Above a white ruff, the shape and size of a small millstone, emerged a head with lank, dirty reddish hair and a straggling beard. He had a large misshapen nose, a mean mouth and small, resentful eyes which gave him the look of a small-time criminal who has just been cheated out of his share of the loot. It was clear that if anyone required an adventitious aid to erotic success it was Black Jack.

‘Something of a character,’ said Johnnie complacently.

While this was happening the other house guests were asking the housekeeper, as she dispensed tea, which rooms they were to be allotted for the night. Piggy Wark-Winkworth was the last to ask.

‘And where am I sleeping?’ said Piggy.

Without a break in her tea pouring, Mrs Maxton said: ‘You’re in the Blue Room, Miss. I’ve already put your things there.’

As every actor knows, sometimes showing no expression at all can be as effective as making a face. When Johnnie looked at me, I looked back at him with a completely blank countenance. Our eyes met, and he understood at once that I was not going to betray him.

It was from that look that I date a certain understanding—I would not exactly call it friendship—between Johnnie Buckland and myself. When he was in London he sometimes used to invite me to have lunch with him at his club, Whites, where he would confide in me. I do not flatter myself that he found me particularly wise or sympathetic. I think it was more that he trusted my discretion, particularly because I was an outsider and, unlike Pat and Robert, had no ambitions to be part of his social milieu.

His confidences were mainly sexual in nature. He was a man of strong, almost obsessive desires. He was fascinated by all forms of sexual perversion, but not out of a wish to practice them: his own preferences were exclusively adult, consensual and heterosexual. Nevertheless he wanted, within these conventional parameters, to experience as variously as possible. Commitment to an exclusive relationship was, since the failure of his marriage, not something that interested him at all.

Once, I broached the subject of the Blue Room, and he was, after an initial reluctance, honest about it.

‘Oh, yes. It works, all right,’ he said.

I asked whether he, as well as the ‘victim’, felt the room’s influence. He told me that he did. I asked him what it felt like.

‘It’s like a vibration,’ he said. ‘It’s as if the whole room is alive with sexual energy. Your whole mind becomes focused on one thing, and one thing alone, so that the rest of you can’t think straight.’

‘It sounds dangerous.’

‘It is. I keep it almost permanently locked now, ever since Mrs Maxton, unknown to me, put the old Bishop of Worcester in there. He was eighty three.’

‘Did he have a heart attack?’

‘Oh, he survived, but Poppy didn’t.’

‘Poppy?’

‘My favourite Labrador. She must have wandered in at the wrong time. Her grave is in the Rose Garden. I’d rather not discuss it. So I try to use the Blue Room as little as possible, but it does work as what I call “an icebreaker”.’

I made no comment and later felt guilty about my silence.

One weekend when we were in Gloucestershire Johnnie came over to drinks at the cottage. I noticed at once that he was in a dejected mood, but Pat and Robert were so delighted to have him under their humble roof that they seemed oblivious to his state of mind. While they were out of the room assembling the canapés and champagne for this informal occasion, I asked him what was wrong. Johnnie slumped into a chair and dug his hands deep into his jeans pockets.