It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (12 page)

“I think we might as well begin,” he said.

Trevor spoke for an hour. As ever, his presentation was scholarly, a little meandering, with one or two pedantic jokes, which we laughed at dutifully. Some of our members, who were following his researches more closely than I was, jotted things down in notebooks as he read. 1 myself was content to sit and let my thoughts wander where they chose; at a certain point one comes to recognize the limitations of a person’s mind, and in a general if not a literal way, one knows in advance what they are going to say on any given subject.

There was a short question and answer period. Donald Kurwen stepped up to the platform again, thanked Trevor, and gave a few words of welcome to the newcomer, Lucille Thomas, who was to follow him. Evidently Donald had no more idea what to expect than the rest of us, and after extending good wishes and appreciation on behalf of us all, he smiled at the young woman and led us in the round of applause with which we customarily welcome a debut.

The young woman climbed onto the platform and stood at the very front of it, ignoring both the chair and the lectern. It had grown quite dark in the room by now. The lamp on the platform was behind her, filling the irregular hollows of her cheeks and eyes with shadow.

There was a pronounced hush in the audience, as there always is when someone takes the stage for the first time. This is a moment of hope and excitement for us all. However much experience may have taught us to expect disappointment or at best qualified success, the mere impression of possibility, of promise not yet unfulfilled, tends to fill even the most jaded of us with a sense of impending revelation.

“I’m just going to stand here,” Lucille said.

She stood at the front of the platform with her hands at her side, her jacket hanging shabbily over her thin-looking torso, her hair hanging in lank clusters. It dawned on us that her presentation was going to be practical, not theoretical, and at once the already quite keen attentiveness of the audience became even sharper. The proportion of people who are actually gifted (or believe they are) to those of us who are merely curious and enthusiastic is of course minuscule, and “practical” demonstrations are correspondingly rare. Not only that; most of them tend to fail, whether because of unreadiness, self-delusion, loss of nerve, or simply some delicate imbalance in the atmosphere.

In a very short time, however, it was apparent that this presentation was not going to join the list of failures. Quite how the terms of its success were to be judged was less certain (they are still being debated), but nobody can doubt that something extraordinary was happening, and within seconds I think we all realized we were in the presence of a virtuoso.

Words didn’t enter into Lucille’s presentation, and words probably will not convey the experience any better, say, than the bundles of triple zeros in an astronomy book convey the physical dimensions of space.

Ellen Crowcroft, most simply and perhaps most accurately, said that as she sat watching the girl, she had suddenly started to feel as if she were dying. Janice Hall said that it reminded her of a morning when she had woken from a blissful dream and had lain for several seconds bathed in its ebbing light until with an overwhelming feeling of desolation she was left with the stark memory that her husband had left her the week before and was not coming back. In general we all felt it to be an experience of unillusion rather than the reverse. Some felt little more than the kind of lowering of spirits that a good drink can easily remedy. One of the younger members reported feeling suicidal. A man whose name I don’t know said that he had been reminded of the radiation therapy he had once been given for a tumor, a similar distressing sense of prematurely surrendering the integrity of one’s living flesh to a force from the inorganic universe, the same feelings of acute, unnameable anguish and danger. Personally what I remember is this: First an abrupt transition from wondering what the young woman on the platform was going to do into a realization that I was being acted upon by a power outside my own control. Next, a feeling of being very quickly drained of energy: a sensation of heaviness in my limbs, of torpid fatigue in my eyes and head. Then, for about a minute, an almost dizzying sadness, as if some mysterious essence that made life tolerable were sluicing out of me. Finally I just felt numb and inert, incurious about myself, the girl onstage, and the people around me.

I left directly the demonstration was over. I had recovered from my numbness sufficiently to be extremely perturbed by what had happened, and I wanted to reflect on its implications in peace. 1 walked to the tube station along the same streets that earlier on had struck me as so oppressively dull and repetitive. This time, though, presumably as a physiological reaction to what I had just experienced, these houses, the lampposts, the pillar-boxes, clipped laurel hedges, creosoted palings, cherry trees, cars, pigeons, brackish dusk, bloated clouds, and disappearing sun impinged on me in a quite different light, a light of delicate and mysterious enchantment, as if my relation to them had been subtly shifted so as to reveal animating nuances of shade and depth that had previously been invisible to me. A sensation of calm happiness spread through me: warm, comforting, and expansive. I went home with the feeling of excitement that accompanies the realization, so rare as one gets older, that one has just been shown something absolutely new.

Lucille repeated the demonstration several times for us over the next few weeks. Word spread, and with every performance the Kurwens’ double drawing room became more crowded. Each time the same annihilating pall fell over the hushed audience within a few seconds of the girl’s taking the platform. The same palpable sensations of energy being depleted, of depression, listlessness, and apathy being uncovered like successive archaeological strata under a sharp and probing excavating tool, were reported in discussion afterward. Few of us were in any doubt that something of profound importance was being revealed. What was it, though? From the answers Lucille gave to our questions, it was apparent that she didn’t understand her gift any more than we did. Certainly it didn’t seem to give her any pleasure or pride. On the platform she merely stood still, stooped, slightly derelict-looking, staring at the floor with her hands hanging limply at her sides. Afterward she looked and sounded, if anything, even more despondent than she had before. She seemed to offer herself as the victim of an unknown sickness offers herself for examination to a group of physicians, not so much in the hope of being cured as of redeeming an otherwise pointless suffering from futility by giving it at least the potential usefulness of medical data.

One day—it must have been Lucille’s fourth or fifth performance— Donald Kurwen announced that she was going to do something different this time and wanted us to stand closely around her so that we could see.

She sat on a chair at the edge of the platform. There must have been more than fifty of us, the full complement of members, including ones who had not been seen for several years. With some difficulty we crowded into a circle on the floor in front of her and the platform behind. A single recessed ceiling light was left on, dropping a beam directly onto Lucille. One of her hands was balled into a fist, and after we had all settled into positions where we could see clearly, she put her arm out, propping it on a crossed knee, and opened the fist.

In the palm of her hand was what looked at first like a shred of whitish dust but on closer inspection turned out to be a little downy feather, no more than an inch long, with a needle-thin white spine out of which grew first a nimbus of fluff and then, for about a third of an inch, neatly tapering white filaments clinging to one another with their minute jellyish barbules to form a triangular tip. Certainly it looked closely related to dust, and by that branch of the family a cousin of absolute nothingness. But obviously the whole of creation stands between this latter pair, and most of evolution between the former, and for all its frailty and insubstantiality, the little feather’s involvement with existence was tight and intricate. I emphasize this because as it began to disappear under our eyes, melting away gradually but steadily from the outer fringes, what we experienced was not the pleasing but almost insignificant difference between its being in the palm of Lucille’s hand and its not being there that would have been produced by a purely aesthetic perception of the disappearance, but a feeling of something quite powerfully discomforting, both physically and, for want of a better word, ethically, as if in standing around Lucille we had come under the stress of some immense accelerative or centrifugal force, and from the thickened continuum of space between ourselves and the surrounding objects, something was being torn with a savage and stupendous violence.

Two or three more frail things passed into nothingness under Lucille’s impassive gaze that winter: a dead bluebottle, a hairpin, a tiny sprig of evergreen leaves, these latter apparently involving more effort than she had expected; after beginning to fade at their outer edges, they started tremulously recovering their shape instead of disappearing, as if struggling to reassert themselves in defiance of whatever force Lucille was deploying against them. But after a few minutes they lost ground again and this time steadily faded away.

Spring arrived, and with it our New Year’s party. Following the practices of civilizations better versed in the rites of renewal and reinvigoration than our own (one thinks of the Persian Tatars, the Mandaeans of Iraq), we designate spring equinox as the first day of our collective calendar and see it in each year with a party at the house of one of our patrons. While the taboos of our own civilization make an out-and-out orgy (the orthodox model for such festivities) problematic, we do all we can with food, drink, music, and dancing to induce in ourselves at least an approximation of the state of eudaemonia considered necessary to the sacred moment.

This year the party was to be held at the house of Helen Van Kemp, a wealthy and generous widow in St. John’s Wood.

It was a cool, moist evening. I arrived at the gates of Mrs. Van Kemp’s mansion at the same time as Janice Hall, and I remember Janice remarking that you could smell spring in the air. Torches lined the short garden path, burning with flickering yellow flames. A maid took our coats, and we stood a moment in front of the hallway mirror, checking our appearances. With the exception of a few theatrical types, our members tend not to be especially interested in sartorial matters, and to an outsider we would probably look a rather dowdy lot on most occasions. But for our New Year’s party it was customary for everyone to dress up in whatever finery he or she possessed: for the men black tie or white tie, gold and crimson cummerbunds, war medals, silk cravats, and so on; for the women evening dresses, high heels, lipstick, and perfume. Janice, I recall, was wearing a green dress of a demure but close-fitting cut that suited her surprisingly well. She had had her hair done in a new style that made her look younger, and she wore a pearl necklace with matching earrings. I was reminded of how attractive she had always seemed to me when she had first joined us, long before her husband had left her and a kind of determined shabbiness set in, as if she were trying retroactively to rationalize his unexpected rejection of her. I told her she looked very elegant, and she thanked me, smiling at me in the mirror.

Helen Van Kemp came along a corridor to greet us in her usual effusively considerate manner. Like many very rich people, she worked hard at making one feel like an old and particularly dear friend from whom only the most extraordinary circumstances had kept her away in the interval that had passed. Her connection with our group dated from ten or twelve years ago, when Ellen Crowcroft—at that time more active than she is today—had put her in touch several times with her husband, Sir Clyde, who had been killed when his private jet crashed over the Isle of Man. I myself was present at the last of these occasions; it was spectacular and intensely moving. After twenty minutes or so the candlelit room had filled suddenly with an overpowering smell of jet fuel. We were all terrified the place was going to explode. An ecstatic-looking spasm seized Ellen. She tilted back her neck, and out of her radiantly smiling lips came the voice of a man, muffled a little as if by static, but perfectly intelligible, and with a kind of clipped, raffish tenderness that brought us all rapidly to tears. “Helen darling,” it said, “I’m here. You’re much missed. I can’t stay. Think of me always.” That’s all. Ellen wouldn’t accept payment herself and instead suggested Mrs. Van Kemp become a patron of our group, which she very willingly did. Since then she has funded the researches of a number of our more promising younger members and more than once taken her turn hosting our New Year’s party.

This one was already in full swing. Janice and I followed Helen into the suite of grand rooms, some of them partially cleared for dancing. There was a wonderfully festive atmosphere. A jazz band corraled in potted palms was playing dance music. Many members had brought their families or other guests. Children in fancy dress were running around; white-gloved waiters were threading through garrulous clusters with trays of champagne. Buffet tables laden with salmon, cold sirloin, breads, salads, fruit tarts, and other desserts had been set out in the dining room. All the rooms had been garlanded with spring flowers. Boughs of lilac and forsythia were arranged around the windows; daffodils, lilies of the valley, and hyacinths stood in vases, filling the rooms with the fresh smell of spring.

The old gang were all there: Donald and Brenda Kurwen; the Cheniers with their shy twin daughters, both in pink and white frocks; Ellen Crowcroft, looking splendid in her white stole, leaning on a gnarled, silver-knobbed cane, her hearing aid gleaming in her ear more like some totemic ornament than a medical appliance. We stood together, chatting about the old days, and when we had eaten, we took to the floor for an hour or so of spirited dancing.

At midnight we went into an upstairs room where seats had been arranged around a raised platform. Our way of thanking our benefactors for their support was to present them with a demonstration by one or other of our more gifted members. Braidism, demonstrations of ectenic force, “community of sensation” experiments, and so on have always been popular on such occasions, and I suspect the atmosphere must resemble that of certain drawing rooms in the last century when celebrity performers did the rounds with their table tapping, invisible piano playing, and other tricks. Last year Ellen Crowcroft actually re-created an experiment that J. H. Petetin of the Lyon Medical Society had performed on Mme. de St. Paul in the 1890s, when someone in another room—in our case our hostess—put different foods in her mouth, while Ellen, with the pleasant smile that always appeared on her face as she settled into a trance, called out peppermint, mayonnaise, raspberry vinegar, anchovy, and so on with faultless accuracy.