Hearing secret harmonies (16 page)

The actor agreed.

‘Somebody was saying that the other day. Who was it? I know. It was after the performance last week. Polly Duport’s friend with the French name. He’s a writer of some sort, I believe. He thought Molnar an undervalued playwright in this country. What is he called? I’ve met him once or twice, when he’s come to pick her up.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t know her at all well.’

‘A French name. De-la-something. Delavacquerie? Could it be that?’

‘There’s a poet called Gibson Delavacquerie.’

‘That’s the chap. I remember Polly calling him Gibson. Small and dark. They’re two of the nicest people.’

I heard no more about this revelation – it graded as a revelation – because someone on the far side of the table distracted the actor’s attention by saying how much he had enjoyed the Ibsen. Almost simultaneously a voice from my other flank, soft, carefully articulated, almost wheedling, spoke gently.

‘We met a long time ago. You will not remember me. I’m Paul Fenneau.’

Smooth, plump, grey curls (rather like Smethyck’s, in neat waves), pink cheeks, Canon Fenneau stretched out a hand below the level of the table. It seemed rather unnecessary to shake hands at this late juncture, but I took it. The palm surprised by its firm even rough surface, electric vibrations. I had to admit he was right about my not remembering him.

‘At a tea-party of Sillery’s. I should place it in the year 1924. I may be in error about the date. I am bad at dates. They are so meaningless.’

For some reason Canon Fenneau made me feel a little uneasy. His voice might be soft, it was also coercive. He had small eyes, a large loose mouth, the lips thick, a somewhat receding chin. The eyes were the main feature. They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. His cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true, with eyes like that. In the manner in which he gave you all his attention there was a taste for mastery.

‘In those days I was a frightened freshman from an obscure college. I can’t tell you how impressed I was by the august company gathered in Sillery’s room – if I rightly remember the afternoon we met. I didn’t dare open my mouth. There was Mark Members, for instance, whom I noticed you talking with before dinner. I’d never seen a large-as-life poet in the flesh before. How I envied Mark for the fuss Sillers made of him. I remember Sillers pinched his neck. I’d have given the world in those days to have my neck pinched by Sillers. Then there was the famous Bill Truscott. Truscott, already working London, so tall, so distinguished, a figure entirely beyond my purview in the undergraduate world I frequented.’

Fenneau sighed, and smiled. It was hard to believe he had ever been frightened of anybody. I still had no recollection of meeting him, even while he recalled that particular tea-party of Sillery’s; which, for various reasons, had made a strong impression on myself too. Fenneau could easily have been one of several undergraduates present, who were – and remained – unknown to me; though no doubt introduced at the time, Sillery being keen on introductions. Subsequent silence about Fenneau on Sillery’s part would indicate not so much Fenneau’s own pretensions to obscurity – Sillery rather liked to glory in the obscurity of some of his favourites – as cause given that afternoon, or at a later period, for Sillerian disapproval. Fenneau was probably one of the young men passed briskly through the Sillery machine, and found wanting; tried out once, never reprocessed. So far as being speechless went, Sillery did not necessarily mind that. The occasional speechless guest could be a useful foil. Some of his own pupils in that genre were quite often at the tea-parties. They set off more ebullient personalities. I hoped Fenneau would not produce embarrassing reminiscences of my own undergraduate behaviour at Sillery’s, or elsewhere in the University.

‘Did you often go to Sillery’s?’

‘Very few times after the first visit. I was not encouraged to pay too frequent calls. Just the necessary tribute from time to time. Rendering unto Sillers the things which were Sillers’. My claims could not have been less high, even for pennies that bore, so to speak, Sillery’s own image and superscription.’

He smiled again, making, with a morsel of bread, a gesture indicative of extreme humility.

‘Claims on Sillers?’

‘Rather his claims on myself. My late father was an English chaplain on the Riviera. For a number of reasons Sillers found useful a South of France contact of that kind. Besides, my father was a personal friend of the Bishop of Gibraltar, a prelacy to attract the regard of Sillers, owing to the farflung nature of the diocese.’

‘I can see that.’

‘But my manner of talking about Sillers sounds most ungenerous. I would not speak a word against him. He did me, as a poor student, kindnesses on more than one occasion, although he could never reconcile himself to some of my interests.’

‘You mean Sillery did not like you going into the Church?’

Fenneau smiled discreetly.

‘Sillery had no objection to the Church – no objection to any Church – as such. He liked to have friends of all sorts, even clergymen. He did not at all mind my living in an undergraduate underworld, the
bas fond
of the University. The underworld, too, had its uses for Sillers – witness J. G. Quiggin, who attended that same historic tea-party.’

‘You know Quiggin?’

‘I do not often see JG these days. For a time – after meeting at Sillery’s – we became quite close friends.’

Canon Fenneau made a sound that was not much short of a giggle, then continued.

‘Like Sillers, JG found some of my interests ill advised. Socially unacceptable to Sillers, they were politically decadent to JG. Hopelessly unprogressive. JG wanted everyone he knew to be interested in politics in those days. He was a keen Marxist you may remember. I have never liked politics.’

‘May I ask what are these interests of yours that arouse so much antipathy?’

Fenneau smiled, this time gravely. He did not speak for a moment. His small watery eyes gazed at me. There was a touch of melodrama in the look.

‘Alchemy.’

‘The Philosopher’s Stone? Turning base metal into gold?’

‘I prefer to say more in the sense of turning Man from earthly impurity to heavenly perfection. It is a conception that has always gripped me – naturally in a manner not to run counter to my cloth. Some knowledge of such matters can indeed stand a priest in good stead.’

He spoke the last sentence a little archly. The reason for his name’s familiarity was now revealed. Fenneau’s signature would appear from time to time under reviews of books about Hermetic Philosophy, the Rosicrucians, Witchcraft, works that dealt with what might be called the scholarly end of Magic. His own outward physical characteristics – not in themselves exceptional ones in priests of any creed – were, more than in most ecclesiastics, those to be associated with the practice of occultism; fleshiness of body allied to a misty look in the eye. Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh, hierophants of other mysteries, were both exemplars of that same physical type, in spite of what was no doubt a minor matter, difference of sex. These preoccupations of Fenneau’s would explain the faintly uncomfortable sensations his proximity generated. He seemed to convey, especially when he fixed his stare, that he hoped, without making too much fuss about it, to hypnotize his interlocutor; at the very least to read what was in his mind. That, too, was a trait not unknown among conventional priests of all denominations. Canon Fenneau, clearly not at all conventional, possessed the characteristic in a marked degree.

‘Do you still see Mark Members? *

‘Not for a long time until this evening. We have never entirely lost touch, although Mark – unlike JG – considered me less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels, when we were undergraduates. Years ago I was able to help him. He carelessly wrote somewhere that Goethe mentions Paracelsus in
Faust
, a slip confusing Paracelsus with Nostradamus. Mark was attacked on that account by a rather unpleasant personage, of whom you will certainly have heard, who called himself Dr Trelawney.’

‘I’ve even met him.’

‘I assisted Mark in rebutting these aggressions by pointing out that Trelawney’s long and abstruse letter on the subject darkened counsel. I added that, even if Paracelsus supposed every substance to be made up of mercury, sulphur, and salt, mercury was only one of the elements. Trelawney recognized the warning.’

‘What was the warning?’

‘Mercury is conceived in alchemy as hermaphroditic. Trelawney was at that time engaged in certain practices to which he did not wish attention to be drawn. He sheered off.’

Fenneau’s features had taken on a menacing expression. Dr Trelawney had evidently found an adversary worthy of crossing swords; perhaps, more appropriately, crossing divining rods. I retailed some of my own Trelawney contacts, beginning with the Doctor and his disciples running past the Stonehurst gate.

‘That too? How very interesting. May I say that you bear out a deeply held conviction of mine as to the repetitive contacts of certain individual souls in the earthly lives of other individual souls.’

Fenneau again fixed his eyes on me. He gave the impression of a scientist who has found a useful specimen, if not a noticeably rare one. His stare was preferably not to be endured for too long. He may have been aware of that himself, because he immediately dropped this disturbing inspection. Perhaps he had settled to his own satisfaction whatever was in his mind. I took the initiative.

‘Nietzsche thought individual experiences were recurrent, though he put it rather differently. But what did you mean by saying “that too”?’

‘I was astonished to hear that as a child you should have known Trelawney.’

‘Only by sight. I did not meet him till years later. It is true that, as a child, he haunted my imagination – at times rather more than I liked. Haunting the imagination was the closest we came to acquaintance at that early period.’

‘Haunters of the imagination have already come close to the imagination’s owner. From that early intimacy would you give any credence to the claim of Scorpio Murtlock that in him – Scorpio – Trelawney has returned in the flesh? Some proclaim that as well as Scorpio himself.’

The question was asked this time very quietly, put forward in this unemphatic manner, I think, deliberately to startle. In fact there can be little doubt that Canon Fenneau had such a motive in view. I took the enquiry as matter-of-factly as possible, while accepting its unexpectedness as an impressive conversational broadside. It would have been bad manners to admit less.

‘You know Murtlock too?’

‘Since he was quite a little boy.’

Fenneau spoke reflectively, almost sentimentally.

‘What was he like as a child?’

‘A beautiful little boy. Quite exceptionally so. And
very
intelligent. He was called Leslie then.’

Fenneau smiled at the contrast between Murtlock’s nomenclature, past and present.

‘You still see him?’

‘From time to time. I have been seeing something of him recently. That was why I was aware he would be known to you. You may have read about certain antagonisms Scorpio was encountering. I believe a good deal never got into the papers. In consequence of this rumpus there was some talk of a television programme about the cult – one of the series
After Strange Gods
, in which Lindsay Bagshaw recently made a comeback, but perhaps you don’t watch television – and I was approached as a possible compère. I had to say that I had long been a friend of Scorpio’s, but could not publicly associate myself, even as a commentator, with his system, if it can be so called. Mr Bagshaw himself came to see me. It transpired, in the course of conversation, that Scorpio had visited you in the country.’

‘That was produced as a reference?

‘Mr Bagshaw seemed to think it a good one.’

I did not often see Bagshaw these days, but made a mental note to take the matter up with him, if we ran across each other.

‘Murtiock was one of your flock in his young days?’

That was an effort to set the helm, so far as Fenneau was concerned, in a more professionally clerical direction; not exactly a call to order, so much as a plea for better defined premises for discussion of Murtlock’s goings-on. If I were to be brought in by Bagshaw as a sort of reference for Murtlock’s respectability – on the strength of allowing the caravan to be put up for one night – I had a right to be told more about Murtlock. That he had been a pretty little boy might be a straightforward explanation for extending patronage to him, but, anyway as a clergyman, it seemed up to Fenneau to provide a less sensuous basis for their early association together. After further biographical background was given, enquiries could proceed as to whether Fenneau himself had set Murtlock on the path to become a mage. Fenneau was in no way unwilling to elaborate the picture.

‘Scorpio once sang in my choir. That was when I was in south London. His parents kept a newspaper shop. As ever in these cases, there was an interesting heredity. Both mother and father belonged to a small fanatical religious sect, but I won’t go into that now. It was with great difficulty that I secured their son for the choir. I should never have done so, had Leslie himself not insisted on joining. His will was stronger than theirs.’