The Takeover (22 page)

In the meantime he thought it well to declare a special congress of his flock. Pauline Thin, who in kindly moments Hubert called ‘Our Mercury’, sent messages by telephone and by grape-vine word of mouth to numerous fellow-worshippers who lived within easy travelling distance of Nemi; she also sent out a number of telegrams, cautiously worded in each case, in order to get together a preliminary meeting of kindred souls, the elect Friends of Diana and Apollo, and so prepare for an even grander gathering which Hubert projected for the following autumn and which he spoke of variously as an ‘international synod’, a ‘world congress’ and a ‘global convergence’. Hubert was aware that the ecclesiastical authorities as well as the carabinieri already viewed his house with suspicion and that his activities were regarded with a certain amount of local disfavour. ‘They can’t pin anything on me,’ Hubert said, ‘not drugs nor orgies nor fraud. We are an honest religious cult. All the same, we have to be careful.’ Mostly he feared Lauro and the Radcliffe family, feeling sure they would, if they could, use any eventual excuse to bring trouble on his Fellowship, which was covering expenses by now, very nicely. What Hubert had in mind for his final project was to try and syphon off, in the interests of his ancestors Diana and her twin brother Apollo, some of the great crowds that had converged on Rome as pilgrims for the Holy Year, amongst whom were vast numbers of new adherents to the Charismatic Renewal movement of the Roman Catholic Church. News had also come to Hubert of other Christian movements which described themselves as charismatic, from all parts of Europe and America; a Church of England movement, for instance, and another called the Children of God. Studying their ecstatic forms of worship and their brotherly claims it seemed to him quite plain that the leaders of these multitudes were encroaching on his territory. He felt a burning urge to bring to the notice of these revivalist enthusiasts who proliferated in Italy during the Holy Year that they were nothing but schismatics from the true and original pagan cult of Diana. It infuriated him to think of the crowds of charismatics in St Peter’s Square, thumbing their guitars, swinging and singing their frightful hymns while waiting for the Pope to come out on the balcony. Not far from Nemi was the Pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo. Next month, he fumed, they will crowd into Castelgandolfo, and they should be here with me.

Pauline, meanwhile, was having the time of her life. Men pressed her against the wall and kissed her whether she liked it or not. She found herself at the centre of Hubert’s young following, surrounded by attentive people and to spare. She was determined to keep her privileged position of having been in with Hubert from the start, holding on to it partly by a habit she had of reminding Hubert by little hints, privately from time to time, that some of those records she had been obliged to put in order over the past three years still puzzled her. Pauline’s allusions to the records inevitably subdued any attempt by Hubert to get rid of her, as he could now afford to do. He, meanwhile, on these occasions, finding himself stuck with her in this uneasy relationship, got himself quickly out of his troubled state of mind by telling himself he was fond of Pauline, very, very fond. When he told himself this for a few minutes continuously, he believed it, and did not appear in the least aware of having capitulated to a piece of blackmail, except that on such occasions he called her Miss Thin for the rest of the day. Perhaps it was his age; at all events he associated his pagan cult with his own very survival and was ready at least to endure Pauline for it; he was prepared to love her as far as he could and to let her fill the house and garden with anyone whomsoever, so long as they didn’t bring in forbidden drugs, use up the hot water in the house, and provided they subscribed to the Fellowship. On these conditions he was content with the arrangements that Pauline made and especially with her rule that nobody could approach him except through her; that suited him very well.

Pauline herself had put a number of young people to work for the cult. She had roped in Letizia Bernardini as press officer and Pietro Bernardini as public relations officer. There was an older man, Pino Tullio-Friole, Berto’s son, who also made regular pilgrimages to the home of Hubert, descendant of Diana, bringing contributions of money and precious objects and some of his wealthy friends who liked to attend the religious services and afterwards sleep with whoever was available. Pino, who was in his early forties, despised Maggie and resented her marriage to his father.

Hubert brooded especially over one of the many press cuttings Letizia had produced for him. It was dated 18 May, and was taken from the English-speaking paper of Italy,
The Daily American.

‘Cardinals, bishops meet, dance in Rome,’ was the headline. It said:

ROME, 17 May (AP)—Bishops, archbishops and cardinals, struggling to keep their hats in place, sang and danced in ecstasy, embracing one another and raising their arms to heaven.

The Most Rev. Joseph McKinney, auxiliary bishop of Grand Rapids, Mich., joined hands with the Most Rev. James Hayes, archbishop of Halifax, who in turn linked arms with Leo, Cardinal Suenens of Belgium.

The unlikely chorus yesterday opened the Ninth International conference on charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church.

The conference theme of ‘renewal and reconciliation’—the theme of Holy Year—underlines the movement’s search for wholehearted approval in the official Church.

A crowd of about 8,000, most of them Americans, gathered at the catacombs of St Callixtus, burial place of the early Christian martyrs, for the opening ceremony. A young band led the congress in song, and delegates from Quebec to Bombay testified to the growth of the movement in all continents.

Cardinal Suenens, archbishop of Malines, urged participants to use the four-day reunion ‘to renew your faith, to renew your hope in the future, to love each other like you never did before’.

The Charismatic Movement, a predominantly lay movement claiming more than half a million followers, emerged in main line Protestant churches in the early 1960s and in Roman Catholicism in 1967, among students and professors at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

It is characterized by fervent prayer meetings, gifts of the spirit such as ‘speaking in tongues’ and efforts to breathe new life into personal religion.

In a recent report, American Catholic bishops credited the movement with ‘many positive signs…a new sense of spiritual values, a heightened consciousness of the action of the Holy Spirit, the praise of God and a deepening personal commitment to God.’

But they warned of dangers inherent in the revival—divergence from the official Church, fundamentalism, exaggeration of the importance of the gifts of prophecy and speaking in tongues.

‘Tongues is not the important thing; the important thing is the change in your life,’ said Bob Cavnar, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who came here for the meeting from Dallas, Tex.

Cavnar, introduced to the movement by his son Jim, was one of 70 congress elite renowned for speaking in tongues and selected to receive messages to the conference from the Holy Spirit.

Hubert kept many such cuttings, read and re-read them, with a sense of having been cheated of his birthright. He had sent Pauline at the beginning of June to one of these meetings and afterwards had locked himself with Pauline into the drawing-room, or rather, locked out the rest of the drifting acolytes and lovers who at present made up his household, to hear her story.

‘It started off,’ said Pauline, ‘with a mass.’

‘In church?’

‘No, no. It was an altar set up in this flat in the Via Giulia. I don’t know whose flat it was. Well, they had a mass, there was a Catholic priest with his vestments, and the congregation, about thirty people.’

‘What sort of people? Rich, poor, how did they strike you? All English-speaking? What language was the mass?’

‘It was in English, but there were lots of Italians and French, all sorts. All sorts of people and some nuns. Quite a lot of nuns in their habits; and later I found some were nuns and priests in ordinary clothes. They seemed all ages, really, but only one or two really old, and they were nuns.’

‘It is from ordinary people that the great revenues come,’ said Hubert. ‘They are filching the inheritance of the great Diana of Nemi, the mother of nature from time immemorial.’

‘I did talk about Diana, don’t worry,’ Pauline said. ‘A number of people were very interested. And do you know who was there? Those Jesuits, Cuthbert Plaice and his friend Gerard Harvey the nature-study man, were there. Father Gerard, in fact, was urging some of the young men to come to one of our meetings and telling everyone how wonderful Nemi was, how the environment comes right up to the back door and so on. Father Cuthbert was asking me a lot about your personal origins, Hubert, and I told him well, it was a long story. Then—’

‘Miss Thin,’ said Hubert, ‘I want the whole picture of this charismatic meeting and you can tell me afterwards what the Jesuits said. At the same time, my dear, I must say it was most commendable of you to get your word in about the true Fellowship. You’re wonderful, Miss Thin, you really are. Tell me about the mass.’

‘Well, the mass only preceded the meeting. It was an ordinary mass except for the swinging hymns, and the fact that the Kiss of Peace was real kisses, everyone kissed everyone. That sort of thing. The nuns seemed to like it and there was lots of embracing and singing.’

‘We should have nuns in the Fellowship,’ Hubert said. ‘Diana always had her vestal virgins. We should have vestal virgins watching a flame on the altar day and night.’

‘Well, they would have to be part-time,’ Pauline said. ‘Who is going to come and watch a flame all day?’

‘When we have a greater following,’ Hubert said, ‘all these things will fall into place. Did the Jesuits participate in this orgy?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say it was an orgy. The Jesuits were there as observers, anyway. The prayer meeting that followed the mass was more exciting, when they spoke with tongues and made emotional comments on the scriptures. They made a sound like an Eastern language, Hebrew, or Persian maybe, or Greek, I don’t know what; but that’s speaking with tongues. Then they prophesy. There was a woman there, about thirty-five, she prophesied a lot, and would you believe it, she was a doctor. She proclaimed a passage from the Gospels and closed her eyes and threw up her hands. Everyone said “Amen”. Then we sang and clapped hands in syncopation, and sort of danced—’

‘What passage from the Gospels?’ said Hubert.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Something about St Paul in his travels.’

‘That is not the Gospels. It is probably the Acts of the Apostles. What was the text?’

‘Oh, I don’t remember. Something about the Lord. It was all so noisy, and everybody was excited, you know. It wasn’t so important what the words were, I think.’

‘It never is,’ Hubert said. ‘And what were the Jesuits doing?’

‘Well, they didn’t join in but they seemed to be enjoying it all. Their eyes were all over the place. Cuthbert Plaice saw me. He said “Hi, Pauline, how do you like it?” I said I liked it tremendously, and I really did as a matter of fact, but the feeling wore off afterwards, you know.’

‘We must step up our services in the Fellowship’ Hubert said, ‘that’s clear.’

It was a hazy hot afternoon towards the end of June. Beyond the ranges of the Alban hills you had to imagine the sea, for indeed it was there, far away, merging invisibly into the heat-blurred sky-line.

Pauline had been busy over the past ten days, putting such a massive amount of energy into the task she had undertaken that in fact she felt she would never again in the course of her life find it in her to repeat the effort, even although Hubert kept reminding her that this was only a preliminary little gathering to the one planned for the autumn.

At the end of ten days Pauline had arranged a fairly big gathering of Hubert’s faithful to be held in the large overgrown garden behind the house stretching to the dark, moist woods. She had announced the event as a ‘secret meeting’, totally avoiding any written messages. Pauline had spent many hours on the telephone and had travelled around in Hubert’s car to notify the Friends of Diana and to exhort attendance. The object of this meeting was to form a nucleus around which the future cells of the Fellowship were to collect.

Pauline had not been able to get much done with the garden, but she had cleared enough to put up an altar and a flowery canopy, and to prepare a covered marquee for the fruit juice and sandwiches.

‘What will we do if it rains?’ she had asked Hubert snappily on one of those frantic ten days of preparation.

‘It will not rain,’ thundered Hubert.

On the last day she had been to Rome to get her hair cut and set, and also to buy the remarkable outfit which she now, as the expected throng began to accumulate, triumphantly wore. Too late, Hubert had seen her and exclaimed, ‘You can’t wear that!’ This was a khaki cotton trouser-suit with metal-gold buttons on the coat and its four pockets; Pauline had tucked the trouser-legs into a pair of high canvas boots, so that the whole dress looked like a safari suit. The hunting effect was increased by a pale straw cocked hat which perched on her short curled hair.

‘What do you mean?’ Pauline said when Hubert, already waiting in his leafy bower, bedecked in his silver-green priestly vestments, had exclaimed ‘You can’t wear that!’

‘It’s entirely out of keeping, and irreverent. You look like the commandant of a concentration camp or something out of a London brothel.’

‘It signifies the hunt,’ Pauline said. ‘Diana is a huntress, isn’t she?’

‘She is always portrayed wearing a tunic,’ Hubert said, ‘and a quiver full of arrows.’ It was a hot day, and his vestments were heavy, which made him feel sicker than ever.

‘Well, I can’t wear a tunic,’ said Pauline, ‘I haven’t the figure.’

‘The figure!’ shouted Hubert from under his greenery and his robes. ‘The figure …,’ he shouted across the garden. ‘If you think your figure fits into that outfit, with your haunches like a buffalo’s—’