The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (26 page)

Then the scene changed. Jean made an entrance through the patio doors carrying a heavily-weighted, red plastic bucket. The guests scattered to make room for her as, with a heave, she hurled the contents of the bucket, which was water, over the recumbent Alec. Some of the water hit the barbecue so that there was a great hiss and cloud of steam. Alec fell back without a cry and lay motionless on the flagstones, as the steam drifted over him like the fog of war. There was some nervous laughter, even a tentative round of applause. Jean looked round at the assembled guests with contempt.

‘There!’ she said. ‘Satisfied? Now you can all bugger off!’

The party dispersed quickly without many words being exchanged. When Pinson came to say goodbye Jean said nothing but squeezed his hand tightly, a gesture which seemed to suggest that he was absolved of any complicity in the proceedings.

Back in his digs Pinson seriously considered heeding Helen Titlow’s advice, but he was too tired to move beyond consideration to resolution.

**

Had it not been such a fine morning, he told himself, he might still have left Bidmouth for London and posted the keys to Spyhole Cottage back to Sin and Death, but they had already been given a cheque for a week’s rent.

By ten o’clock Pinson was driving his car through Bidmouth on his way to the cottage. When he stopped at some traffic lights he thought he saw Helen Titlow crossing the road wheeling a baby buggy. He hooted cheerfully. She turned and saw him, then immediately turned away again. One side of her face had been marred by a fresh dark red bruise.

Spyhole Cottage welcomed him with a vase of freshly picked wildflowers from Sin and Death, and a bottle of champagne from Jean. Pinson spent some contented hours arranging the few books and possessions he had with him and setting up his laptop in the spare room. The mere sight of it gave him confidence and he indulged in the writer’s daydream of uninterrupted hours filled with the gentle flow of flawless inspiration. He even sat down there and then to type a few words, but was distracted by the view through the window of Dodman’s Point. Those two stones did look uncannily like a pair of hands thrusting out of the ground and seemed to presage the fearful resurrection of a giant. Perhaps he could make something of that. Being a writer who believes that art should never imitate life too slavishly he typed the words DEAD MAN’S HILL. Then for good measure he put the words in bold and underlined them.

Having done so he looked again at the source of his inspiration. A human figure was standing by the stones. It was too far away to determine age or sex, but he could see that it was waving. The gesture was ambiguous—it could have been a warning or a greeting—but Pinson was quite irrationally certain that the figure was signalling to him. This lasted for only a few seconds; then the figure disappeared behind the stones and did not re-emerge. Its failure to reappear was not inexplicable as the landscape dipped and curved so much, but the whole experience was disquieting. Pinson decided to have an early lunch and then walk to Dodman’s Point.

**

That afternoon he never reached the Point. The weather remained fine and he set off along the cliff path very cheerfully. The air and exercise was going to restore him, but he was so out of condition that he tired quickly. Besides, Dodman’s Point was farther away than appearance had suggested, and was separated from him by a long inland creek. Still, it was a good enough walk as far as it went, and Pinson returned refreshed but pleasantly weary. As he came into the cottage he found himself humming a tune he could not quite place, irritatingly banal but somehow memorable. He noticed casually that the door of his bedroom was open, yet he was sure he had shut it on his way out. He went to the door and looked in.

On the bed, spread-eagled as on an altar of sacrifice, was the voluptuous naked body of Jean Crowden. Her bra had been draped over the bedpost with calculated erotic abandon.

‘Hello, sailor,’ she said.

Pinson was horrified and thrilled by her vulgarity. This was how Baudelaire must have felt with his filthy Parisian whores, he thought pretentiously.

**

It had been a long time since he had experienced a sexual encounter so utterly devoid of any emotion except lust. A part of his mind had remained quite detached. What am I doing? he kept saying to himself. The physical sensation that struck him most forcibly had been the coldness of her flesh. No doubt the feeling had been accentuated by the fact that he had come in hot and sweaty after a long walk, but there had been more to it than that, he thought. The way it had delayed the moment of climax had been oddly exciting.

Afterwards they had sat in the living room, he dressed, she wearing only a bath robe of his while they drank her champagne and talked as if nothing had happened. Despite being a prominent figure in the theatrical life of Bidmouth, Jean showed surprisingly little interest in the arts generally. Her talk was of the social world she inhabited, and Pinson soon realised how foolish he had been in supposing that to her amateur dramatics was anything more than a means of acquiring status. But she was a shrewd woman nonetheless, and could be entertainingly malicious. They did not talk about the incidents of the night before. Pinson was curious about her relationship with Alec but he sensed that a direct assault on the subject would be rebuffed. He decided to ask about Canon Doker instead, as it was he who had provided him with information about Alec and Jean.

‘Ah! I thought you’d be intrigued by our Canon,’ she said. Pinson hated assumptions being made about his likes and dislikes, but he let it pass. ‘Teddy Doker is incredible. He knows everything. He’s a sort of guru to us really.’

‘And who is defined as us?’

‘Us, darling. Surely you realise who “us” is?’

She let the bath robe fall open and splayed her legs so that a powerful scent of her sexuality was wafted across the room. It was a challenge.

Pinson said: ‘You tell me.’

‘You of all people should understand, darling. We call ourselves “The Gang”, or “The Coven”, but that’s just a joke. Teddy teaches us, and he celebrates the Gnostic Mass. You know what the Gnostic Mass is, don’t you, darling?’

‘I know a little about Gnosticism, I suppose. It was a sort of heresy.’

‘Yes, well that was theory, but this is practice. You thought all that stuff with Madame de Montespan and Guibourg and the rest is all history. Safely in the past. Typical writer. Oh, no it isn’t, darling, it’s alive and well and living in Bidmouth.’

‘Good God!’

Pinson had not meant to betray shock but he did. Jean’s reaction was to roar with laughter. She bounced in her chair, kicked up her legs and cackled. When she had subsided she said: ‘Admit it, Dan, you’re just eaten up with curiosity about us, aren’t you?’

Pinson avoided her look. Jean said: ‘I know you. You’re going to put us all into your next play.’

‘No I’m not,’ said Pinson, ‘because no-one would believe it for a moment.’ Jean cackled with laughter again. Pinson could not be certain whether she thought this genuinely funny or was mocking the traditional response of writers in the face of intractable circumstance.

‘These Gnostic Masses,’ said Pinson. ‘What precisely is the purpose that they serve?’

‘Do you want to see one and find out?’

Pinson was irritated by the anticipation of his moves; so he tried to assume an air of casual indifference. ‘That might be rather interesting,’ he said.

‘Right. You’re on.’

**

During the next few days Pinson spent the mornings trying to write while, in the afternoons, Jean would come by for an episode of cold congress. Once he asked her where Alec thought she was going when she visited him, and she replied: ‘Oh, he knows, darling.’ Pinson looked at her hard but could not tell whether this was truth or bluff. She laughed at his feeble attempts at mind-reading.

On the fourth day after Pinson’s move to the cottage Jean said: ‘Are you up for it tonight?’

They were lying on the bed after a rather feverish bout. It was late afternoon. Pinson suddenly felt cold.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘You know what I mean, darling. The Gnostic Mass. It’s on for tonight.’

‘What is this Gnostic Mass?’

‘There’s only one way of finding out, darling. I’ll pick you up at eleven.’

**

‘Where are we going?’ said Pinson, as they got into the car.

‘You’ll see, darling.’

They drove to a part of Bidmouth that Pinson had never seen before—‘the unfashionable end’ said Jean laconically—and stopped in front of a large Classical-looking building in a state of disrepair. It was dark and drizzling, so that Pinson could see very little. They got out of the car, Jean flashing a torch to light the way.

As her torch played over the front of the building Pinson caught sight of a wooden board, cracked and blistered with neglect, which bore the words: EBENEZER METHODIST CHAPEL. Jean led Pinson round to one side of the chapel. The walls were covered with stucco, much of which had fallen away, leaving great raw patches of stonework like festering wounds; weeds sprouted from every crevice. Pinson looked up at the windows, but saw no light coming from them.

‘We sometimes rehearse here,’ said Jean irrelevantly. The rain was beginning to come down more heavily. They descended some steps and stopped in front of a low door. Jean took out her car key and scratched on it three times. Almost immediately the door opened a crack and the narrow mean face of Death, Adela Strange, peered suspiciously out at them. She was holding an old oil lamp.

‘Come on, Adela,’ said Jean. ‘Let us in! It’s peeing down out here.’

‘We’re just about to start,’ said Death querulously as she let them in. Pinson saw that she was wearing flip-flop sandals and a knee-length diaphanous gown through which her naked body, gnarled and emaciated, could plainly be seen.

‘Dan and I will be watching from the gallery tonight,’ said Jean.

‘Well,’ said Death, ‘you’ll have to find your own way up there. You can’t borrow my lamp.’

‘It’s all right, Adela,’ said Jean in a weary voice which implied she was used to such curmudgeonly behaviour. ‘I’ve got a torch.’ Death walked towards a thick damask curtain and disappeared behind it while Jean led the way up some dusty wooden stairs that creaked dangerously.

‘Careful where you step,’ said Jean. ‘Some of the treads have gone.’

They emerged into a semicircular wooden gallery with long benches, some collapsed or broken, rising up on a series of graduated wooden platforms. Against the front wall of the chapel, behind the apex of the gallery, were the remains of a great organ whose cracked pipes mounted up to the ceiling like the towers of a ruined citadel.

Jean and Pinson sat themselves on a bench directly in front of the organ from which they could lean over the balcony and look down into the body of the chapel. Before he could take in any visual impressions Pinson was struck by a wave of fetid heat that surged up from below, bloated with smells of bodies, washed and unwashed, of smoke, incense and burnt spices. The impact was so strong that he choked and recoiled. Jean giggled.

It took a few moments before Pinson could recover and look again. Long black drapes covered the windows allowing no light or sound to penetrate inwards or outwards. The great space was lit fitfully by a number of sanctuary lamps of gilt bronze and pink glass that hung from the ceiling on metal chains. Light also came from two large coal braziers onto which an elderly dwarf, dressed in the red cassock and white ruff of a choirboy, occasionally threw coals and handfuls of incense. The braziers flanked a great table draped in purple damask situated in the very centre of the chapel. Around it hung banners made of black cloth embroidered with pentacles, sigils, the goat of Mendes. In front of the altar was splayed a chaos of sofas, rugs and old mattresses on which lounged and sprawled an assortment of men and women, mostly middle aged to elderly. Pinson recognised members of the cast of his play, Sin, Death, Ron Titlow and others of ‘the gang’ that he had seen at the barbecue. They were either naked or scantily dressed in underwear or transparent negligees. Some drank from bottles. A long-haired bearded man in a pair of grey underpants whom Pinson had seen in the lighting box at the Jubilee Hall was injecting himself. Someone unseen was playing a long, skirling, dreary melody on some reed instrument.

‘Come on! Come on!’ said Jean, drumming her fingers on the balcony. ‘I thought that bitch Adela said they were about to start.’

There was a sound like the banging of an old fashioned dinner gong. The piping ceased as did the murmur of conversation. In the silence a little tinkling bell was heard; then from the back of the church came the procession. It was led by a monstrous figure dressed, like the dwarf, as a choirboy with a curly blonde wig, swinging a censer. When he began chanting in a falsetto voice Pinson realised that it was Alec Crowden. He glanced at Jean but she was absorbed in the spectacle, inured to its strangeness.

The second figure was Canon Doker. His feet and legs were bare, but he wore a short lace cotta over which was a yellow chasuble embroidered with black pine cones. Pinson suspected he had nothing on beneath these two garments. He carried a huge silver chalice, with a domed cover whose finial was a silver Uraeus, the Egyptian cobra symbol, signifying supreme power.

The other two figures in the procession were perhaps even stranger. The first was a fit and muscular young man, naked but for a goat’s mask covering his face. He carried an oblong box like a child’s coffin and was leading on a chain a thin, naked young woman with a black blindfold around her eyes. Pinson believed this to be Helen Titlow whom he recognised from the still livid bruise on the side of her face. He deduced that the man in the goat’s mask must be her boyfriend Greg, the games master at Bidmouth Comprehensive.

When the procession had reached the purple-draped altar table Helen was laid across it and the Canon began to intone words in Latin. As far as Pinson could tell they were the words of the Catholic Tridentine Mass. What made them hideous was the way he chanted them in a high, nasal voice and the way that the responses were yelled back by his two choirboys (Alec and the dwarf) who were kneeling, one each side of the altar.