Faustine (13 page)

We were sitting together, just two ordinary people in early middle age, and I suppose we looked comfortable together, because an old lady at the next table asked where we came from, as if we were a couple, you know.

Harry put his head in his hands at that and almost sobbed. And just as he was pleading with me to extricate him from the nightmare of life with Lisa Crane – the Empress of the Air, as she was known, of course, by then – we both looked up and saw her standing at the plate-glass window, staring in.

It was so terrible – so frightening. How could she have known? She was wearing, I remember so well, a
canary-yellow
wool suit, and her chauffeur-driven Rolls was just
behind her, parked in the midst of all the traffic as if she were royalty and no one would think of moving her on. Which, of course, they didn’t.

 *

As Anna speaks, I remember the rhymes I read the children at the nursery back home, and I remember too, because poor little Chi-ren had been frightened by tales of Chinese devils and demons, the jingle of the woman and the devil who tried to escape from her. ‘Art and cunning he did not lack‚’ say I, as if from a deep trance of seeing the words on the page and feeling Chi-ren’s little body pulling away from the picture-book on my lap. ‘But aye with her whistle she fetched him back.’

– Yes, Anna says. She always fetched him back. Harry sprang up, as guilty as a scalded cat, and made for the snackbar door. Anna smiles again, but without pleasure. It was left to me to pay for the meal, she says.

You see, Jasmine says, she was afraid.

We are in the kitchen and dinner is nearly ready. The chicken and roast potatoes come out of the oven and sit glistening on the table. Jasmine will carve here, and then put the food back until the other two guests arrive – my grandmother and Harry Crane.

Jasmine sharpens a long knife on a knife-grinder that looks as if it’s been in the kitchen at Woodford Manor since the Victorian owners furbished the kitchen with the ponderous objects they made their servants use. I sit on a chair watching her. She speaks low and fast, to get in the end of her tale before my mother comes out of the little sitting-room and bathroom, where the Neidpaths have invited her to get ready for dinner.

I want to imagine how Anna must be feeling – after seeing me like this, and before seeing the change in her mother that Jasmine has promised for tonight. But there isn’t the time. I’ve seen, with all the urgency of necessity, that the days of Lisa Crane must almost be up; that it must be
twenty-four
years to the day since my grandmother took me to the park and was wolf-whistled on her way out by students asking her for a date, on a windy midsummer evening, at nine o’clock. Twenty-four years of unlimited power in return for the immortal soul: the pact made between Faust and Mephistopheles.

Muriel will return to her old self tonight, but she will be seventy-two years old.

 *

– Yes, Ella, Jasmine says, and the thin, worn blade of the knife which has seen better days detaches a wing from the carcass of the bird. Yes, some years ago your grandmother did try to give up the life she was leading and return to her kind, loving, unselfish self.

She missed you terribly, of course. And – for Jasmine has seen me blush and look away – she knew she had lost touch with you, that sending dolls and little girls’ party dresses just wasn’t the thing any more.

And she wanted to have a good relationship with Anna too. Every mother who loses her daughter is distraught at heart, I believe.

Now, Ella, shake the salad, Jasmine says as I redden further and start picking at the tablecloth, made of wartime oilcloth, on the table of the Neidpaths’ unprepossessing kitchen.

And she hands me a wire basket of lettuce, indicating I should go to the back door and shake it on the cobbles outside.

– She wanted to give up the whole Harry business, Jasmine goes on as I open the door and see a big moon already down on the roof of the stable block opposite, and the beech trees round the village green magically lit up, as if for a druidical Disneyland.

I told her Anna was seeing Harry again – that they’d really been made for each other in the first place.

‘You must come to terms with it, Lisa,’ I said (she wouldn’t let anyone call her Muriel by then). It was just a … an extended one-night stand with Harry, wasn’t it?

Well, she was sick with rage. We were in her bloody great Eaton Square apartment, with all the Aubussons, and the
mirrors everywhere, as befitted Lisa Crane, and the beautiful Meissen and Chelsea and Dresden china – and she just threw a fit and started smashing the lot. ‘You just tell me where I can find the bastards‚’ she says (meaning Anna and Harry, of course), ‘and I’ll see to it, I’ll see they never smile again.’

I thought the harsh reality might cure her, so I said they met sometimes in a fast-food joint right near the middle of town. A pretty squalid place, I agree, with all that scum and drug crowd hanging around, but I don’t honestly think Harry and Anna cared where they saw each other. No
five-star
restaurants for them.

So, as I heard from her next day, she went off and saw them there. And the shock of the reality of it did work – for a while, anyway.

‘I’m ready to give up, Jas‚’ she said to me. (We were in my modest little flat this time, and I think the surroundings helped to calm her down – or feel more that there was a possibility of becoming an ordinary person again.) ‘It’s time I gave over, and why shouldn’t young people have a chance, for God’s sake?’

I thought all this was very unlike Lisa Crane, but I didn’t say anything at the time. I was too delighted, as you can imagine. She’d been made even more contrite too by haring off in search of Anna, to apologize, apparently, for the tough time she’d given her in the past, and finding her in a corner supermarket near Anna’s flat. (Anna, as you know, moved from Chelsea when it became too expensive, and settled in a pretty rough district in the north of town. God knows what the manageress – or the other customers – thought when Lisa did her Rolls number and walked in.

But Lisa was upset at being taken for Anna’s daughter. ‘Such bloody bad luck on Anna‚’ she says, ‘but then, she’s never been a lucky girl.’

– Yes, bad luck, I say.

– So, after that, Lisa is determined to reform. It must have been a couple of weeks before I saw her again. I must say I was terrified by the change in her. The effort to return to another way of life had driven her – I’m sorry to say – pretty well insane.

– How? I ask Jasmine, as I shake the leaves of the lettuce dry, and empty the wire basket out into the salad bowl. I see that rabbits have nibbled at the green leaves and a small slug, obstinately clinging to a leaf, has left a tiny silver trail.

 *

– I went to see her in her skyscraper office, Jasmine says. And I thought the secretary looked nervous when I said I wanted to see Lisa Crane straight away.

She was recording an interview, the secretary said. And after that, there was lunch at the Guildhall with the Lord Mayor. But there was something else troubling the girl, I could see that.

Finally, Lisa emerged, and I took her into the first room I could find – it was an empty boardroom, as it happened. I made her sit down. ‘What’s the trouble, Lisa?’ I said.

And she suddenly looked haggard – not a day older, mind you, but drained … and haunted.

‘I’m having terrible dreams, Jas‚’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, help me out of this.’ And she said she kept dreaming she’d found the TV salesman – the man who got her to sign the contract. She found him and persuaded him to cancel this terrible lease – but when she woke, it was to hear him laughing at her; and when she went to the mirror, there, unchanged, was her beautiful, unlined face.

 *

– Poor Lisa, Jasmine finishes. She hasn’t been well for such
a long time. But tonight, in the happiness of being reunited with her family again, she will recover. You’ll see.

 *

I look at Jasmine and I realize that she arranged for me to come here, that Maureen Fisher would never have blurted out the name of this place unless she had been told to. And I begin to fear, to find myself going to the door of the kitchen again, that leads into the courtyard and the beginnings – at least – of the outside world.

But Jasmine pulls me back sharply and propels me along the passage to the green baize door.

– Tell your grandmother dinner is ready, she says.

I am on the upper floor of the house.

I am wearing a dress that I found laid out on the bed where I slept – and woke, last night, to see the anger and surprise of Harry Crane.

I am walking along the landing where I passed the bales of silk and the straw suitcases of shells, from Lisa Crane’s journeys of the past. I am going straight ahead, where a low arch leads to a descent of three steps and a corridor, whitewashed and innocent-looking, under eaves of thatch.

 *

I can hear the crowds on the downs, and now, as evening falls, I can see the careless bonfires they have lit, as near as the Woodford woods, by the edge of the river as it bends in its last loop before the race to Slape weir.

The sky is pink from the glow of the fires, but I can smell nothing. I walk carefully in the dark-green velvet dress, with a fichu of lace at the throat, as if I were going into a lifetime’s confinement – a dark place where I would be neither heard nor seen, the prison of old age.

 *

The corridor ends with a door that’s ajar and shows a further flight of steps, out of doors this time, with a reed roofing.

But I turn into the room on the right, just before the door to the steps, which are probably a flight down into the
garden, and I stand looking across at the bed where Lisa Crane lies, asleep.

I make no noise, but she wakes up and sees me. The mirrors in the room show her face and mine – like two halves of an apple, shivering in the looking-glass doors.

I turn and leave the room. I go along the landing to the main stairs and I go down. It is time for dinner and Mrs Neidpath is crossing the hall with a tray.

I know why she thinks she has seen me here before.

It is growing dark and a line of cloud, like a bruise resting on the lid of an eye, runs along the line of the downs.

At the grey stone house lights shine from the windows, and in particular from the dining-room window, where a gold candelabra holds red candles alight in the centre of an elaborately laid table. Two women sit at the table waiting. They are Anna Twyman and her mother Lisa Crane’s
companion
, Jasmine Barr.

The church clock in the bell tower strikes the first chime of nine.

A man can be seen to be walking slowly up the drive towards the door of the manor. He doesn’t turn to go to the back, over cobbles to the kitchen door, but keeps on the road, avoiding a bump where someone long ago built a child’s fortification with sand and mud.

The clock continues to chime.

In the house a young woman stands on the staircase and then begins her descent to the hall.

The hall is lit to the full tonight, a whirling strobe of colour, and sound, as all the great old hits come belting out.

In the doorway to the hall a couple, Mr and Mrs Neidpath, are standing together. Mrs Neidpath is holding a tray. They look as if they are waiting for some signal from the woman on the stairs. But she gives none, and walks on.

The clock finishes chiming nine. A hand is raised, and knocks on the oak door.

The door is opened by the young woman when she reaches the hall. A wind comes in with the visitor and blows the couple, Mr and Mrs Neidpath, backwards into the
pounding
music and the light of the shrine to Lisa Crane.

Borne along by the wind, the young woman can be seen walking up the drive of Woodford Manor, her arm in the arm of the visitor, who wears black boots built up at the heel and a dark suit.

It can only be the effect of light and shade from the moon – the swirling party colours from the windows of the house – that gives the impression that an old woman, huge in the faint glow from the fires in the woods, is running up the drive after them.

I have been invisible, unfortunately, since the Tarot pack designed by the exquisite miniaturist Bembo. I am a blank, a white space, but, of course, many writers and scholars have chosen to fill that space with words, and if my style is fanciful, I beg forgiveness – or at least understanding, for, as Nabokov remarked when he entered the skin of that old devil Humbert Humbert, murderers are inclined to flowery prose.

I give the above example for a reason. Lolita, as we know, was the ultimate temptation for the diabolical lecher, jail-bait bargainer, harridan-hater, Humbert. And just as the libertine teen-snatcher had eyes only for his Lola, his Lo-Lee-Ta, so I, I must admit with a certain hangdog air, can experience a rising of the flesh only when confronted with the sight of its drooping, falling and withering on a member of the fairer sex.

I am – to a Centrefold world – a pervert. I love women in their middle age. How I adore to see their eyes light up with astonishment and gratitude when I pay one of the compliments I learned at the court of the Medicis. How fulfilled I esteem myself to be when an ageing beauty pouts and simpers at me. Women of ‘a certain age’ are – well, it’s too obvious, really – they’re easy prey. But one thing’s
certain
at that age: they become invisible, like me.

Take the case of Muriel Twyman. I would stalk her as she
left the riverside house where it was impossible for me to go, for fear my fire might be put out – such a damp,
unsalubrious
place.

I followed her as she got on the bus, got off again, walked in fashionable streets near her office, where I own so many chains of shops and boutiques that all the shopping malls in Hell can’t hold a candle to them.

I went in after her, across the tessellated marble floor of the magnificent building I erected for the interglobal
communications
network I need to keep the cauldron of greed simmering – the pot that keeps the world on the boil and lowers it every day nearer to those regions in which no one any longer believes.

I would ride up in the elevator with her. And I would watch as she went to her desk and set about her daily task of inventing the language to worship youth, and I would see her face grow older every day, while the beautiful models on the covers of my expensive magazines stayed always, always young. And my love for Muriel Twyman grew, and so did my desire for her.

At office parties, no one saw Muriel. How my heart would ache for her, as she stood quite unnoticed against a wall while the pretty models and the lascivious men helped each other to the cornucopia of exchanged favours on offer. How I feared for poor Muriel, when she limped home on the shoes that squeezed her feet, and had straight away to care for her little granddaughter and make the evening meal.

And how I despised her daughter Anna, with her foolish, ‘progressive’ ideas and her blindness as to the real nature of women – which is to grab love, to feed voraciously on the affections of the children they dominate and raise, and to demand attention and obedience at all times.

Just for the fun of it, I decided to teach her a lesson – while
consummating my deep love for poor, harassed Muriel, of course.

Nothing could have been easier than to infiltrate myself into that particular household. The daughter, Anna, like all those frustrated spinsters – she was a virgin at heart, although she had given birth to a peculiarly unprepossessing baby girl – was thrilled by my arrival in her life.

Within days she was buying dresses and dancing to the new music I had decided to bring into the world, to give a pounding sound to the last years of the second millennium since the birth of the Redeemer – your Redeemer, who has nothing now to redeem but the pawn ticket of eternal life.

As Anna and I danced (to be near her was pretty repellent for me, but I saw real need in the mother), my lonely, unloved Muriel was darning children’s clothes and suffering the agonies of the damned, as she heard Anna and myself making love lengthily and luxuriously in what had until very recently been her own bed.

Before long my opportunity came, and I was quick to take it. In one of the chains of TV stores with which I have covered the surface of the dying world, I met the sad
menopausee
and offered her, at the flick of a switch, a return of beauty, youth and desire. And – after all, I’m no
stinge-merchant
– power and money as well. Why not? If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself, why, as I’m sure Anna would very strongly agree with me, why not a woman, in this age of equality?

You know the rest. Muriel certainly enjoyed herself, in that decade where ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was – I am glad to remind you – a recurring hit. And, after all, things had changed for ever then, or so the young thought. The machines and the lights and the music and the sound made
the world a gigantic recording studio, where the movie of life, printed on an indestructible tape, would play and play.

Everyone had forgotten that unendingness is Satanic chaos. Chaos even became fashionable. This was pleasing, obviously, to the old prince of all mingling and ambiguity, my master, the one who sent me out in search of my latest convert to the cult of eternal youth.

Once or twice I was asked to account, in Hell, for the time I took over the conversion of Muriel Twyman.

Be patient, I replied. Muriel was a good woman, as these wretched specimens are known, and she has to learn to enjoy the body of a young and sexually forceful woman again, while all her memories and experiences are those of a woman whose cycle is done – in short, a hag.

Muriel had to learn the exquisite power over men that her new position and beauty afforded her. At first, as in the case of the – mistaken to my mind – need for her little granddaughter, she still lived in a past that was no longer written on her body surface.

I took great pleasure, I may say, in pushing the clinging and unattractive child out of the boat – down, down into the water.

But by then I was too enamoured of my creation, the new, heartless Muriel, to prevent her from pulling the child out again. You could say, perhaps, that little Ella was the famous Lisa Crane’s Achilles’ heel.

Jasmine Barr … well, we need handmaidens as much as ever we did. Ha! She may extricate the hairs on her chin with a tweezer every day, but there is a natural witch if ever I saw one. Envious, spiteful, gloating over the mishaps of others – she brought Muriel to me without any trouble at all, and even sent for the granddaughter when the time had come.

Please pay no attention to those distressing ‘dreams’ Muriel claimed to have suffered when she made the foolish decision to try and renege on her contract with me. I only switched a few channels when she came to visit me in the TV shop to present her ridiculous plea for old age. I simply showed her, after a flash of her good self at the age she actually was – and that, I can assure you, was enough to make the silly woman turn tail – I only showed her, as I say, a few programmes that happened to be playing around the world that day. A round-up of prostitutes, if I remember, in some hell-hole like Manila’s red-light district. A crashed plane, where a deal between arms dealers and governments – and international finance, of course – had blown it out of the sky; weeping relatives at the airport. A few cocaine shipments, a burnt rainforest, and slum kids, gaunt and raiding, pillaging on Crack – that was about all really.

I can’t help it if you figure in all these programmes, I said to Muriel as she stood there sobbing in my smart, newly refurbished store. And I explained to her, as simply as I could, that she had wanted a high profile, and OK, now she’d got one. What the hell do women really want?

And now you must be asking, what do
I
really want – from Muriel Twyman. After all, souls cannot co-exist with consumerism. And attempts at idealism and brotherhood between men have been proved unsuccessful ever since the well-publicized scandal of my little interventions this
century
, notably in the Gulag. So I can hardly have gone to such inordinate lengths for a soul.

No, I must hint merely that next time you happen to turn on the TV, or find yourself lucky enough to be in a red-light district or at the receiving end of a delivery of explosives or guns, next time you enter a casino or flick channels to the latest scandal of politicians and bordellos and lies – you will
see the blonde girls, dead-eyed, who bring in the crooks and villains, the murderers, robbers and rapists, who make up the Chaos that is my legacy.

Next time you see those young women anywhere,
remember
, one of them could be Muriel … or Ella … or it could be you!