Hearing secret harmonies (21 page)

‘I was told you live near here, Nicholas.’

‘Fairly near.’

‘What’s going on?’

He managed to establish a situation in which I, rather than he, found it necessary to give an explanation for being on that spot at that moment. I tried to summarize briefly for him the problem of the quarry and The Devil’s Fingers. Gwinnett nodded. He made some technically abstruse comment on quarrying. In spite of outward calmness he was not looking at all well. This was very noticeable at close quarters. Gwinnett’s appearance was ghastly, as if he had drunk too much, been up all night, or – on further inspection – slept on the ground in his clothes. The dark suit was covered in dust and scraps of grass. His shoes, too, were caked with mud. He brought with him even greater disquiet than usual; a general sense of insecurity increased by the skies above becoming all at once increasingly dark.

‘Have you been visiting The Devil’s Fingers?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re staying near here?’

‘Not far.’

‘With friends?’

‘No.’

He named an inn at a small town a few miles distant. It appeared from what he said that he was alone there.

‘I didn’t know you were interested in prehistoric stuff – or has this something to do with your Jacobean dramatists?’

Gwinnett, as was often his habit, did not answer at once. He seemed to be examining his own case, either for a clue as to what had indeed happened to him, or, already knowing that, in an effort to decide how much to reveal.

‘I’ve lost my way. Just now I came up the same path, as well as I could remember it. I don’t know how to get down to the road from here.’

‘You’ve been to The Devil’s Fingers before?’

‘We came up on foot last night. I couldn’t sleep when I got back. I thought I’d drive out here again. Make more notes on the spot. It’s because I’m tired I’ve forgotten the path down, I guess.’

‘You’ve got a car with you?’

‘It’s parked in a gully off the road. Beside some old cars that have been dumped there. I took the steep path up the hill. It stops after a while. That’s why I can’t find the place.’

‘You were here last night?’

‘Some of the night.’

His manner was odd even for Gwinnett. He talked like a man in a dream. It occurred to me that he was recovering from a drug. The suspicion was as likely to be unfounded as earlier ones, in Venice, that he was a homosexual, or a reclaimed drunk.

‘Were you one of the party dancing round The Devil’s Fingers last night?’

Gwinnett laughed aloud at that. He did not often laugh. To do so was the measure of the state he was in. His laughter was the reverse of reassuring.

‘Why? Were they seen? How do you know about that?’

‘They were seen.’

‘I wasn’t one of the dancers. I was there.’

‘What the hell was going on?’

‘The stag-mask dance.’

‘Who was performing?’

‘Scorp Murtlock and his crowd.’

‘Are they at your pub too?’

‘They’re on their own. In a caravan. Those taking part in the rites travelled together. Scorp thought that necessary. I met them near here. We came up to the place together.’

‘Who were the rest of the party?’

‘Ken Widmerpool, two girls – Fiona and Rusty – a boy called Barnabas.’

‘Was Widmerpool in charge?’

‘No, Scorp was in charge. That was what the row was about.’

‘There was a row?’

Gwinnett puckered up his face, as if he was not sure he had spoken correctly. Then he confirmed there had been a row. A bad row, he said. Its details still seemed unclear in his mind.

‘Did Widmerpool dance?’

‘When the rite required that.’

‘Naked?’

‘Some of the time.’

‘Why only some of the time?’

‘Ken was mostly recording.’

‘How do you mean – recording?’

‘Sound and pictures. It was a shame things went wrong. I guess that was bound to happen between those two.’

The flashes of light seen by Ernie Dunch were now explained. Gwinnett seemed to find the operation, in which he had himself been anyway to some extent engaged, less out of the ordinary, less regrettable, than the fact that some untoward incident had marred the proceedings.

‘Russell, what was all this about? Why were you there? Why was Widmerpool there? I can just understand Murtlock and his crew going on in that sort of way – one’s reading about such things every day in the paper – but what on earth were you and Widmerpool playing at?’

Gwinnett’s features took on an expression part obstinate, part bewildered. It was a look he had assumed before, when asked to be more explicit about something he had said or done. No doubt his present state added to this impression of being half stunned, a condition genuinely present; if not the result of a drug, then fatigue allied to enormously heightened nervous tension. Again, seeming to consider how best to justify his own standpoint, he did not answer for a moment or two.

‘Gibson Delavacquerie said you’d seen something of the Widmerpool set-up, the commune, or whatever he runs. He said Murtlock had joined up with it. Murtlock seems to have taken over.’

Delavacquerie’s name appeared for some reason to bring relief to Gwinnett. His manner became a trifle less tense.

‘I like Delavacquerie.’

‘You probably know he’s abroad at the moment.’

‘He told me he was going. I talked to him about seeing Ken Widmerpool again, but I didn’t tell Delavacquerie the whole story. When Ken sent me a letter after the Magnus Donners Prize presentation last year I said I just didn’t have time, which was true. Anyhow I wasn’t that anxious to see him. I thought he’d forget about it this time, though I may have mentioned I was coming over again. I don’t know how he found out I was in London. I hadn’t told anyone here I was coming over. I only was in touch with Gibson after I arrived. Then someone called me up, and said he was speaking for Ken, who had a young friend – and master – whom he wanted me to meet.’

‘Master?’

‘It was Scorp himself telephoning, I guess. I hadn’t met him then. That was how it started. While he was speaking – and I’ve wondered whether Scorp didn’t somehow put the idea in my head – it came to me in a flash that I’d often thought these weirdos linked up with the early seventeenth-century gothicism I was writing about. Here was an opportunity not to throw away. I was right.’

‘It was worth it?’

‘Sure.’

This was much the way Gwinnett had talked of his Trapnel researches.

‘As soon as I went down there, I knew my hunch was right. Ken was altogether different from the man he had been the year before. He was crazy about Scorp, and Scorp’s ideas. It was Scorp’s wish that I should be present at the rites they were planning. A summoning. Scorp thought my being there might even make better vibrations, if I didn’t take part.’

Gwinnett stopped. He passed his hand over a face of light yellowish colour. He looked uncommonly ill.

‘Scorp said these rites can’t be performed with any hope of success, if those taking part are in a normal state of mind and body. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink myself now for thirty-six hours. I didn’t want to miss the chance of a lifetime, to see played out in the flesh all the things I’d been going over and over in my mind for months – like Tourneur’s scene in the charnel house.’

‘What were they trying to do?’

‘The idea was to summon up a dead man called Trelawney.’

‘How far did they get?’

Gwinnett gave a slight shudder. He was detached, yet far from calm, perhaps no more than his normal state, now aggravated by near collapse.

‘They got no further than the fight between Ken and Scorp.’

Gwinnett’s use of these abbreviated first-names gave a certain additional grotesqueness to what was already a sufficiently grotesque narrative.

‘Did they have a scrap during the rite?’

‘In the middle of it.’

‘The horned dance?’

‘No – during the sexual invocations that followed.’

‘What did those consist of?’

‘Scorp said that – among the ones taking part in the rite – they should have been all with all, each with each, within the sacred circle. I was a short way apart. Not in the circle. Scorp thought that best.’

Gwinnett again put up his hand to his head. He looked as if he might faint. Then he seemed to recover himself. Heavy spots of rain were beginning to fall.

‘Did everyone in the circle achieve sexual relations with everyone else?’

‘If they could.’

‘Were they all up to it?’

‘Only Scorp.’

‘He must be a remarkable young man.’

‘It wasn’t for pleasure. This was an invocation. Scorp was the summoner. He said it would have been far more likely to be successful had it been four times four.’

‘Not Widmerpool?’

‘That was the quarrel.’

‘What was?’

‘It had something to do with the union of opposites. I don’t know enough about the rite to say exactly what happened. Ken was gashed with a knife. That was part of the ritual, but it got out of hand. There was some sort of struggle for power. After a while Scorp and the others managed to revive Ken. By then it was too late to complete the rites. Scorp said the ceremony must be abandoned. It wasn’t easy to get Ken back over the fields, and down the hill. As well as doing the recording – it was all wrecked when he fell – he’d been concentrating the will. He’d been giving it all he had. He wasn’t left with much will to get back to the caravan.’

‘And they just let you take notes?’

‘Scorp didn’t mind that. He even urged me to.’

Gwinnett spoke as if that permission surprised him as much as it might surprise anyone else. He took the black notebook from under his arm, and began to turn its pages. They were full of small spidery handwriting.

‘Listen to this. When I first went to Ken Widmerpool’s place, and met Scorp, I was reminded of something I read not long before in one of the plays by Beaumont and Fletcher I’d been studying. I couldn’t remember just what the passage said. When I got back I hunted it up, and wrote the lines down.’

Gwinnett’s hand shook a little while he held the notebook in front of him, but he managed to read out what was written there.

‘Take heed! this is your mother’s scorpion,
That carries stings ev’n in his tears, whose soul
Is a rank poison thorough; touch not at him;
If you do, you’re gone, if you’d twenty lives.
I knew him for a roguish boy
When he would poison dogs, and keep tame toads;
He lay with his mother, and infected her,
And now she begs i’ th’ hospital, with a patch
Of velvet where her nose stood, like the queen of spades,
And all her teeth in her purse. The devil and
This fellow are so near, ’tis not yet known
Which is the ev’ler animal.’

‘Scorpio Murtiock to the life.’

‘He did shed tears during the rite. They poured down his cheeks. That was just before he gashed Ken.’

‘The familiar contemporary slur of our own day gains force of imagery in additionally giving your mother a dose.’

‘The kid in the play was the prototype maybe. Scorp’s in the same league.’

‘The girl called Fiona is a niece of ours.’

Gwinnett seemed taken aback at that. The information must have started him off on a new train of thought.

‘I don’t know how that nice kid got mixed up with that kind of stuff. Rusty’s another matter. She’s just a tramp.’

He brushed some of the mud from his sleeve. He appeared to feel quite strongly on the subject of Fiona, at the same time was unwilling to say more about her. That was like him.

‘I have to get back. I just wanted to make a few notes on the spot. I’ve done that. They’ll be useful. How do I find where I’ve parked, Nicholas?’

‘We’ll go as far as the top of the hill, and have a look round. You’ll probably be able to recognize the country better from there. Why don’t you have a sleep at your pub, then come over to us for lunch?’

‘No, I’ll sleep for an hour or two, if I can, then get back to London. I want to write while it’s all in my mind, but I’ve got to have my books handy too.’

He made a movement with his shoulders, and gave a sort of groan, as if that had been painful. He was not at all well. I was rather relieved that he had refused an invitation to lunch. It would not have been an easy meal to sit through. We walked up the field together in silence. Round about the circle of elder trees the grass had been heavily trodden down. Rain was descending quite hard now. Gwinnett’s story had distracted attention from the weather. The men with flags were beginning to pack up, the inspecting party massing together again, on the way back to their cars; a few hardy individuals, Mrs Salter, for instance, continuing to talk with the quarry representatives, or make notes. Gwinnett and I reached the summit of the rise.

‘Have a look from here.’

The far side sloped down to the waters from which The Fingers drank, when at midnight the cock crew. The Stones would probably need an extra drink after all that had happened during the past twelve hours. I did not mention the legend of their drinking to Gwinnett. It might seem a small matter, after whatever he himself had witnessed up there. We stood side by side on the edge of the hill. Fields and hedges stretched away in front; a few scattered farms; clumps of trees; telegraph poles; a pylon; far distant bluish uplands. The roofs of the small town, where Gwinnett was staying, were just visible in rainy haze. Main roads, hard to pick out in light diminished by heavy cloud, were marked from time to time by the passage of a lorry. Gwinnett stared for some seconds towards the country spread before us, rather than looking immediately below for his recent place of ascent. He pointed.

‘There they are.’

He spoke in his usual low voice, quite dispassionately. A long way off, where two hedges met at a right angle, what might be the shape of a yellow caravan stood in the corner of a field. The sight of it seemed to cheer Gwinnett a little, convince him that he had not dreamt the whole experience. Now he was able to turn his attention to the land below, from which he had first approached The Fingers. While rain continued to fall he established his bearings.

‘That was the path.’

He pointed down to a sharp decline in the ground, not far from where we stood. Away below to the left, in a hollow overgrown with yet more elder, thick in thistles and ragwort, two or three abandoned cars were slowly falling to pieces. They must have been driven in there, and dumped, from a nearby grass lane. Gwinnett’s vehicle, not visible from where we stood, was somewhere beyond these. He raised his hand in farewell. I did the same.

‘See you in London perhaps?’

‘I’ll be having to work hard through the summer and fall.’

The answer seemed to indicate a wish to be left alone. That was understandable after all the things he had by now tolerated from the presence of other people. He edged unsteadily down the incline towards the brook. Rain was pouring so hard that I did not wait to see him negotiate its breadth, shallow and muddy, but too wide to jump with convenience. Probably he waded through. That would not have added much to the general disarray of his clothing. There was a flicker of forked lightning, a clatter of thunder. The whole atmosphere quivered with fluxes of electricity, discernible running through one’s limbs. At the same time the rain itself greatly abated, diminishing to a few drops that continued to fall. The lightning flickered again, this time across the whole sky. I hurried to rejoin the rest of the party, hastening away like an army in full retreat. In the big field I noticed the ruts, where Ernie Dunch had so violently reversed the Land Rover. They were now filled with water. Mr Goldney, of the archaeological society, collar turned up, hands in pockets, appeared. He was half running, but slowed up, supposing I was looking for something.

‘No weather to search for flints. I once picked up a piece of Samian ware not far from here. It’s an interesting little site. Not up to The Whispering Knights, where I was last month. That’s an altogether grander affair. Still, we have to be grateful for what we have in our own neighbourhood.’

‘Why is it called The Whispering Knights? I’ve heard the name, but never been there.’

‘During a battle some knights were standing apart, plotting against their king. A witch passed, and turned them into stone for their treachery.’

‘Perhaps a witch will be waiting at the stile, and do the same to the quarry directors. Then we’ll have a second monument up here.’

Mr Goldney did not reply. He looked rather prim, shocked at so malign a concept, or unwilling to countenance light words on the subject of folklore. Rain had possibly soaked him past the threshold of small-talk. Mr Tudor, in company with Mrs Salter, both very wet, joined us. Mr Tudor showed signs of a tempered optimism so far as to the outcome of the meeting.

‘The Advisory Committee will have to get together again, Mr Goldney. Will Thursday at the same hour suit you? There’s the correspondence with the Alkali Inspector we ought to go through again in relation to new points raised in consequence of today’s meeting.’

‘That’s all right for me, Mr Tudor, and I’d like to bring up haulage problems.’

Mrs Salter sliced at a bramble with her pruning-hook.

‘Even Mr Gollop admits haulage problems. At first he was evasive. I wouldn’t have that’

Isobel, after a final word with Mr Todman, caught us up.

‘Who was the man you were talking to on the ridge?’

‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home.’

‘You looked a very strange couple silhouetted against the skyline.’

‘We were.’

‘A bit sinister.’

‘Your instincts are correct.’

The company scattered to their cars. Mr Gauntlett, an elderly woodland sprite untroubled by rain – if anything, finding refreshment in a downpour – disappeared on foot along a green lane. The rest of us drove away. The meeting had been a success in spite of the weather. Its consequence, assisted by the findings of the Advisory Committee, and the individual activities of Mr Tudor, was that a Government Enquiry was ordered by the Ministry. To have brought that about was a step in the right direction, even if the findings of such an Enquiry must always be unpredictable. That was emphasized by Mr Gauntlett, when I met him some weeks later, out with his gun, and the labrador that had replaced Daisy.

‘Ah. We shall see what we shall see.’

He made no further reference to nocturnal horned dancers round about The Devil’s Fingers. Neither did I, though their image haunted the mind. It was not quite the scene portrayed by Poussin, even if elements of the Seasons’ dance were suggested in a perverted form; not least by Widmerpool, perhaps naked, doing the recording. From what Gwinnett had said, a battle of wills seemed to be in progress. If, having decided that material things were vain, Widmerpool had turned to the harnessing of quite other forces, it looked as if he were losing ground in rivalry with a younger man. Perhaps the contest should be thought of – if Widmerpool were Orlando – as one of Orlando’s frequent struggles with wizards. Or – since the myth was in every respect upsidedown – was Murtlock even Widmerpool’s Astolpho, playing him false?

I did not see Delavacquerie again until the early autumn. I wanted to hear his opinion about Gwinnett’s inclusion in the rites at The Devil’s Fingers. As someone belonging to a younger generation than my own, coming from a different hemisphere, a poet with practical knowledge of the business world, who possessed personal acquaintance with several of the individuals concerned in an episode that took a fairly high place for horror, as well as extravagance, Delavacquerie’s objective comment would be of interest. For one reason or another – I, too, was away for a month or more – we did not meet; nor did I hear anything further of Gwinnett himself, or his associates of that night.

When a meeting with Delavacquerie took place he announced at once that he was feeling depressed. That was not uncommon. It was usually the result of being put out about his own business routine, or simply from lack of time to ‘write’. He did not look well, poor states of health always darkening his complexion. I thought it more than possible that the trip with Polly Duport had not been a success; projected marriage decided against, or shelved. On the principle of not playing out aces at the start of the game, I did not immediately attack the subject of The Devil’s Fingers. Then Delavacquerie himself launched into an altogether unforeseen aspect of the same sequence of circumstances.

‘Look, I’m in rather a mess at the moment. Not a mess so much as a tangle. I’d like to speak about it. Do you mind? That’s more to clear my own head than to ask advice. You may be able to advise too. Can you stand my talking a lot about my own affairs?’

‘Easily.’

‘I’ll start from the beginning. That is always best. My own situation. The fact that I like it over here, but England isn’t my country. I haven’t got a country. I’m rootless. I’m not grumbling about being rootless, especially these days. It even has advantages. At the same time certain problems are raised too.’

‘You’ve spoken of all this on earlier occasions. Did going home bring it back in an acute form?’

Delavacquerie dismissed that notion with a violent gesture.

‘I know I’ve talked of all this before. It’s quite true. Perhaps I am over-obsessed by it. I am just repeating the fact as a foundation to what I am going to say, a reminder to myself that I’m never sure how much I understand people over here. Their reactions often seem to me different from my own, and from those of the people I was brought up with. Quite different. I’ve written poems about all this.’

‘I’ve read them.’

Delavacquerie stopped for a moment. He seemed to be deciding the form in which some complicated statement should be made. He began again.

‘I spoke to you once, I remember, of my son, Etienne.’

‘You said he’d had some sort of thing for our niece, Fiona, which had been broken off, probably on account of that young man, Murtlock. I’m in a position to tell you more about all that — ’

‘Hold it for the moment.’

‘My additions to the story are of a fantastic and outrageous kind.’

‘Never mind. I don’t doubt what you say. I just want to put my own case first. That is best. We’ll come to what you know later – and I’m sure it will help me to hear it, even if I’ve heard some of it already. But I was speaking of Etienne. He has been doing well. He got a scholarship, which has taken him to America. By then he had found a new girl. She’s a nice girl. It seems fairly serious. They keep up a regular correspondence.’

‘How does he like the States?’

‘All right.’

Whether or not Etienne liked the US did not seem to be the point. Delavacquerie paused again. He laughed rather uncomfortably.

‘When Fiona was about the place, with Etienne, I noticed that I was getting interested in the girl myself. It wasn’t more than that. I wasn’t in love. Not in the slightest. Just interested. You will have had sufficient experience of such things to know what I am talking about – appreciate the differentiation I draw.’

‘Of course.’

‘I examined myself carefully in that connexion at the time. I found it possible to issue an absolutely clean bill of health, temperature, pulse, blood pressure, above all heart, all quite normal. I didn’t even particularly want to sleep with her, though I might have tried to do so, had the situation been other than it was. The point I want to make is that the situation was not in the least like that of
The Humorous Lieutenant
, the King trying to seduce his son’s girlfriend, as soon as the son himself was out of the way.’