The House of Rumour (17 page)

He shrugged and stared back at me with dead eyes. He looked as if he had been dragged through a forest.

‘It’s hard to explain, Larry,’ he said. ‘I saw something.’

I never got the whole story of what he witnessed that night. Over the years he would refer to the time when he had seen ‘something from another world’ but he always seemed reluctant to elaborate further. For a while I thought he worried that I might think he was crazy. But maybe he just wanted to keep it to himself. To save it for his fiction. And the influence of this experience can certainly be found in his work, in stories such as ‘Interstellar Epiphany’ and ‘The Uninvited Guest’. At the time neither of us really wanted to talk about the previous night so we drove back to LA mostly in silence.

Mother was predictably upset when I turned up at the house looking wild-eyed and dishevelled and I was unnecessarily blunt with her when she asked after my whereabouts, loudly declaring that I had been at an orgy.

‘Larry!’ she chided me.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Mother,’ I called out as I went up to my room, ‘your precious son is still a virgin.’

I came down later to find her in the kitchen. Her face was red and puffy; she had obviously been crying. I said I was sorry and then all her pitiful guilt came out. She declared that she had not been a good mother, that she had driven away my father who had left us when I was three. That useless slob of a husband whom she still loved with a pathetic insistence. Poor Mother, I thought for the millionth time. But it was then I knew that I had to get away from her somehow.

Mary-Lou phoned me the next day, saying that she wanted to meet up and talk. Part of me wished that I had the strength to say no but I didn’t. So the following Tuesday I walked into Clifton’s to find her sitting at a corner table reading the
LA Times
.

‘See what we did, Larry,’ she declared, holding up the headline for me to read:

BERLIN DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF LANDING OF REICH LEADER IN SCOTLAND
.

It hardly registered at the time. Recently I’ve got to thinking that the ‘special Mass’ Jack Parsons had officiated at that night was part of Operation Mistletoe. There are stories that Crowley organised similar rituals in a forest in Sussex at about the same time. Whether or not they actually had any effect is another matter. Were they part of some obscure propaganda campaign? At that moment I was so wrapped up in my own private drama that I didn’t pay much attention to the news story. I just sat down opposite Mary-Lou and gave a nervous little shrug. She smiled at me but there was a mournful look in her eyes.

‘Look, the other night,’ she said, trying to break through the awkwardness of the moment. ‘I know you don’t approve but—’

‘It’s not that,’ I broke in.

‘Well—’

‘I love you, Mary-Lou.’

‘What?’ She frowned at me.

‘I’m sorry. I just had to let you know.’

She gave a weary sigh.

‘Well, I kind of guessed,’ she said.

‘And it’s a simple, conventional, boring kind of love. I just want you and nobody else.’

‘Poor Larry.’

‘Please, Mary-Lou, don’t.’

‘I know how you feel.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do. I want Jack. But Jack is in love with Betty.’

‘Betty? Who’s Betty?’

‘Helen’s sister. Remember Helen? Jack’s wife.’

‘Who’s having an affair with the High Priest of the Agape Lodge.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And now Jack’s taken up with his sister-in-law?’

‘Uh-huh. You know, being a script reader, you think you know all the plots. I missed that one.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Oh, carry on loving Jack. All these personal relationships can get melodramatic, but there is a higher love. I’ll stay true to that.’

‘How very wild and unconventional of you,’ I muttered bitterly.

‘Oh, Larry.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s just—’

‘Can we still be friends?’

‘I don’t know, Mary-Lou,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’

As I stood she looked up at me, her sad and plaintive smile like a stab in the heart. I know now that amid all her emotional confusion what she really needed was a friend. She already looked exhausted by the madly idealistic world she had been drawn into.

Soon after that, all the symptoms of my labyrinthitis seemed to diminish, then disappear. I felt somehow cured and at first was unsure what had restored the equilibrium in that delicate maze of the senses. Had it been the effect of the mescaline or the marijuana, or even some strange influence of ritual magic? All my problems with balance or vertigo began to recede and my anxiety resolved itself into a calm melancholia. Perhaps it was the heartbreak that gave some bifurcated stability to my inner life. Finally I had felt something real in my life, even if was just emotional pain.

I gave up going to see Dr Furedi and put all my energy into my work. I spent a lot of time with Nemo that summer. We would both snatch a bit of time off from writing and drive out to the coast. On one occasion Nemo arranged a double date for us that predictably didn’t work out for me. Another time we organised a full-scale beach party for the LASFS. But usually it was just me and him walking along the shore, clearing our heads and talking our ideas into life. Then back to the clatter of the typewriter, chasing tight deadlines and new stories. Nemo could take inspiration from almost anywhere and so swiftly transform it into prose. One afternoon he got the spark of an idea from observing the eccentric street hustlers on Hollywood Boulevard and by the next morning he had turned it into ‘The Hermit’, which he sold to
Incredible Stories
.

I could talk to Nemo about my feelings, about Mary-Lou and the problems at home with my mother. Dr Furedi had always insisted that most of my emotional hang-ups were somehow connected to being deserted by my father. But Nemo had been through that, too, so I no longer felt strange or weird about it.

And he eventually got me to understand something of the complicated politics on the left. He even took me along to a few meetings. He was certain that Trotskyism was the last hope for utopian socialism.

‘It can’t exist in just one country,’ he insisted to me one night as we sat on the beach and watched the sun go down. ‘It’s got to be international.’

‘Maybe it’s got to be more than that, even,’ I countered.

He turned and squinted at me.

‘What?’ he demanded.

‘Well,’ I replied, unable to stop myself breaking into a smile, ‘maybe we can’t have socialism on one planet alone. Maybe it’s got to be interstellar!’

Nemo let out a brief spatter of laughter. Then he sighed and gazed wistfully at the darkening horizon.

‘Who knows?’ he murmured.

Nemo felt proud that he could retain the idealism that had been compromised by orthodox communism. Then Germany invaded the Soviet Union and theoretical discourse became overwhelmed by the practical horrors in that massive clash of ideologies. I think that he felt helpless and guilty as he was once more a mere spectator to the grinding wheel of history. Party members now became indignant and self-righteous; ordinary citizens seemed relieved that these great behemoths were now slugging it out so bloodily on the Eastern Front. The West seemed safe, at least for the time being.

I went up in front of a Draft Board in August and remarkably I was designated 1A – available for unrestricted military service. A lot of my contemporaries were looking around for ways of avoiding being called up. Mother offered to put me through college in the fall, which would keep me out of it for a while, but I refused. I was happy enough to have become a healthy specimen at last.

And for the most part I could get on with my life and not dwell on Mary-Lou or Jack Parsons. But I couldn’t quite shake them off in the fictional world that I sought refuge in. ‘Greek Fire’, which I sold to
Fabulous Tales
, features a rocket scientist unsure of whether to use solid or liquid fuel, who travels back in time to the Byzantine Empire to investigate the dual properties of the ancient incendiary weapon of the title. I saw it as a cathartic exercise, especially the final scene with its huge laboratory explosion. And though I managed to avoid running into Mary-Lou in person, I found it impossible not to read her work. Her ‘Zodiac Empire’ series became more and more mystical and obscure, an epic of conflicting planet colonies in the solar system set against alien influences from distant constellations. Mary-Lou had told me that it was to culminate in its transcendent conclusion, ‘The City of the Sun’, but that instalment never appeared.

It had been a year of quantum leaps, of diverging time-lines, alternate futures and crucial moments where things could go either way: ‘jonbar points’ as SF writers had already started to call them after the title of Jack Williamson’s seminal story. So when I heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which shocked the whole nation, I felt hardly surprised by it. In fact, a strange calm descended upon me as for the first time in my life I knew exactly what to do.

On 8 December I joined the USAAF. I didn’t want to wait for the call-up and I had some insane idea that I wanted to fly. It wasn’t so much out of patriotic duty, or a sense of political commitment. It was more a lonely impulse, simply to take action and to be ruled by fate. And I could break free, leave home without any sense of guilt or responsibility. I hadn’t an inkling of what this supposed independence would cost me and Mother was out of her wits with worry. But now we both had something bigger to blame.

I had a drink with Nemo the night before I shipped out. After we had said our farewells I had the sudden urge to say goodbye to Mary-Lou. I think I had this drunken notion of making some sort of noble exit, full of stoicism and fake nonchalance. But when I called by she wasn’t in. The next morning I was on a bus to the West Coast Air Corps Training Center in Santa Ana and I didn’t see her again for four years.

6

the lovers

Wednesday, 26 March 1941

‘Bloomsbury’s blown to bits,’ K blurted out as our train pulled into Paddington. We had been talking of our last sortie to London, at first in a flippant & almost jolly manner, but by the time we had reached the suburbs of the besieged city the mood darkened considerably. K seemed gripped with a dread of arrival and recalled the horrors we had witnessed last September – all the wrecked buildings in West Central & fires everywhere from the incendiaries. But I remember that it had been the time bomb in Mecklenburgh Square that had disturbed K the most. She had fancifully imagined that the Germans had come up with a secret weapon that had some means of exploding time itself. Of course, given the way that she has played with that dimension in her own work, it was hardly surprising that she might conjure up such a curious conceit. I first thought that she was making a joke, but she was genuinely disturbed by the notion & I had to try to explain that it was merely the business of a delayed fuse. The whole area had to be roped off, which was a disaster for the
Woolfs
Wolves (!) who had only recently set up a new office for the Hogarth Press in the square. Then a month later their house in Tavistock Square took a direct hit. Trust K to come up with a grim formula that trips so lightly: ‘Bloomsbury’s blown to bits.’

It seems odd now but once powered flight had seemed to bring such hope. Like the aeroplane writing in the sky in
Mrs Dalloway
; the great women pilots Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. Well, Earhart and Johnson are dead and all around us is the devastation brought by the air raids. Of course it became a symbol of failure with Chamberlain (‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again’). And in K’s novel the Sacred Aeroplane of Munich becomes a holy relic of Hitlerism.

K took a long time to leave the carriage & as we walked along the platform she again declared that she ought never to have let Victor republish the novel, that she knew it would mean trouble, etc. There was a crowd huddling around the barrier & we stood for a while waiting until all the other passengers had gone through. I grabbed her hand & held it tightly &, checking that nobody was looking in our direction, sneaked a kiss on her cheek. She smiled & pulled me along, turning to point at the poster that said:
IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY
? & we both broke out into a short salvo of much-needed laughter.

Arrived at the Gollancz offices in Henrietta St at about 3 p.m. The place was almost deserted, just a secretary who served us tea with condensed milk. Victor’s moved most of his operation out to his country house in Brimpton. He seemed in an ebullient mood though, saying the Left Book Club edition of
Swastika Night
had sold over seventeen thousand copies & how this was impressive for sales in wartime etc., but K was impatient to get to the heart of the matter – the nature of Victor’s strange summons. It appears that there has been a request via the War Office for an interview with ‘Murray Constantine’ by an intelligence officer. This rattled K & she once again made clear her reasons for continued anonymity. He tried to reassure us but we know the drastic measures that many of us have considered if the worst was to happen. Victor himself has boasted that he’s got hold of a ‘poison pill’ & is ready to take it if we lose the war. There is this Gestapo list everyone talks of – it’s the reason that K used a pen name in the first place. He doesn’t even know what exactly the matter with the WO might be. K tried to insist that her confidentiality be maintained though Victor pointed out that this might be difficult if it was a ‘matter of security’. An ominous phrase. Agreed for Victor to arrange a meeting on Monday.