MASQUES OF SATAN (14 page)

The following morning I found Magda standing in the hall with her bags packed. She said: ‘I am doing no good here. I go back to Mr Poo-Poo.’ I somehow knew that all Anne’s and my protests would have no effect.

‘I prefer to go to Mr Poo-Poo than go to hell,’ she said.

Anne said, ‘You don’t really believe that do you, Magda?’ Magda shrugged her shoulders. I said that the least we could do was to drive her back to Stoke Newington, so she rang Mr Poo-Poo to inform him of her return. From what I could gather by standing near the phone as Magda spoke to him, Mr Poo-Poo was not in the least surprised by her decision. He said he would wait in for her.

When we arrived at Mr Poo-Poo’s flat in Stoke Newington, I having followed Magda’s curt, precise instructions, she told me to park on the other side of the road from the house where his flat was situated. She got out of the car without a word, her belongings in a suitcase that we had given to her as a leaving present.

I did not drive off immediately. From my car I watched Magda cross the street and ring the front door bell. There was a long wait, then the door was opened wide by Mr Poo-Poo. He was wearing a buff cardigan and a pair of green trousers very well pressed, with a crease at the front as sharp as a knife. He had put on weight. There was no expression on his face and he offered her no greeting. She entered the dark hall with bowed head, carrying her suitcase unaided. Then he closed the street door behind her.

We heard no more of either of them. Occasionally, with a twitch of guilt, Anne would say, ‘I wonder how the Poo-Poos are getting on.’ I think she used the name deliberately, so that Nicky and Magda Beale would somehow cease to be real people. She was relegating them to a comic mythology of the past because there was, after all, nothing we could do about them, or so we told ourselves.

* * * * *

Just over a year later, one dark, rainy evening in November, I went to fetch my second daughter Kitty from a children’s party in Notting Hill Gate. When I rang the bell I was confronted by the usual harassed mother who said, ‘Come in. You’re a little early. The entertainer is still doing his stuff.’

I could hear that a raucous time was being had in the big drawing room off the main hall. I would have preferred to have sat peacefully in the hall, and perhaps chatted with the lady of the house, but she had not the time nor the patience for this. She chivvied me into the sitting room, where I joined a small knot of other attendant parents.

Our offspring, seated on the white shag pile carpet in front of us, were watching an old fashioned Punch and Judy show, never a form of theatre that has appealed to me. Mr Punch, hugging a great stick in his stumpy little arms, was smashing Judy about with tremendous vigour, and the children were responding with squeals of delight. Emblazoned on the red and white striped awning that hung down from the puppet stage were the words:

Mr POO-POO

It is extraordinary how the body takes over at moments like these. Before my conscious mind had digested this information, it seemed to me, my heart was knocking and the sour taste of fear was in my mouth. Why? I was in no way threatened. Did I imagine that Kitty, sitting in the front row of the audience, was being corrupted? Punch and Judy was certainly a new addition to Mr Poo-Poo’s repertoire as an entertainer, and it was one at which he had gained a ghastly expertise.

‘That’s the way to do it!’ shrieked Mr Poo-Poo through his swozzle, as Mr Punch gave Judy another tremendous crack with the bludgeon. The children cried out with joy. The strange inhuman distortion of  Mr Poo-Poo’s voice brought to mind the mechanised, metallic tones of the Minikoits in
Jupiter 5
.

To the right and behind the puppet stage a woman was sitting very still and upright on a dining chair, her back to the wall. At her feet was a child asleep in a carry-cot. I wondered who she was. The au pair of the house? Then I recognised Magda. She had not been easy to identify, because everything about her had changed; all colour had gone from her face and clothing, and even the darkness of her lustrous eyes had lost its intensity.

I smiled at her and she pretended not to see me, but I was sure she had. The moment I endeavoured to make eye contact she had looked away and then down at the child. Evidently it was hers, because I recognised that intense gaze of concentrated love with which a mother looks at her own baby. For a moment it wiped the gloom from her face. She twitched at the blankets of the baby’s cot but otherwise made no movement. Above her the little proscenium of Mr Poo-Poo’s puppet stage gaped like the mouth of Hell.

The Silver Cord

Yet, with his inward eye, the city dweller may still step out upon the ancient causeways of England where once the Legions tramped with measured feet from Roman Caerleon to Aque Solia; or dwell unhindered by a stream that dashes in secret haste down between rock and tree from a spring deep within the hollow hills.

LANCELOT JONES LAID DOWN HIS PEN, and knew both satisfaction and discontent. He was confident that his article, provisionally entitled ‘A Vision by Lamplight’, would be accepted by
The Jermyn Street Gazette
. He knew also that the fee of two guineas which he would receive for it was barely adequate to keep his wife and small child from immediate starvation, let alone to pay the rent. The bassinet upon the landing, he reflected ruefully, is the enemy of enterprise.

In those days, and I am referring to the year 1891, Jones, his wife Mary, and two-year-old daughter Sophie lived on the top floor of a dank lodging house in Handel Street in the gloomy wildernesses of Soho. Jones’s writing table was at the window of their front room, from which he looked down into a dingy courtyard where by day dogs barked and dirty children played, and by night even dirtier men and women raged loudly against the darkness.

It should not have been thus, Jones told himself. He had left his native Wales and come to London with such high hopes of literary success, but seven years of drudgery and hard work had received little reward. A few of his stories had been noticed favourably; a collection had been published, but the sales had been disappointing. And in the course of all this he had fallen in love, weighing himself down with the additional burden of a wife and child.

Not that he regretted marrying Mary, who was the sweetest of creatures, but when he thought sometimes of what he had brought her to, his heart burned with shame and anger. Anger raged within him also when he thought of Jocelyn Slade.

He and Slade had been at school together at St Tudno’s, and it seemed to him that they had always been rivals. Both had been equally clever. If Slade was the quicker of the two, Jones was the more thoughtful and original, but between them they won all the school’s academic prizes. At that time they had not been hostile towards each other, merely suspicious and distant. Equal achievements had kept both reasonably content, but when they left St Tudno’s their paths had diverged. Slade’s way had been smoothed because his father could afford to send him to Oxford, whereas Jones’s father, a poor clergyman, could not. Jones had gone to seek his fortune in London where Slade, upon graduating, arrived three years later. Jones was still struggling on the lower slopes of the literary world when Slade landed with winged feet from Oxford, somewhat higher up Parnassus, and nearer to Pall Mall than Grub Street. Almost at once Slade was being asked to write three-guinea reviews of fiction for
The Piccadilly Magazine
and
The Fitzroy Quarterly
. He had even condescended to review Jones’s first work,
Pale Hills
, with a lofty amiability and a faint praise which smelt fouler than outright condemnation. Then Slade had himself published his first book,
The Chronicles of Clarissa
, a novel of high society which had become an instant success. It was clever, Jones had to concede, but it was also cynical, malicious, and utterly trivial. Slade, from being a successful young man of letters, which was just about tolerable to Jones, had been transformed overnight into a literary celebrity, which was not. When Slade’s second novel,
The Duchess’s Diamonds
, was published, Jones had hoped that the fact that the Diamonds were so very obviously paste would condemn their author to oblivion. But Slade’s luck held, the Diamonds were declared to be of the first water, and their manufacturer’s place in the sun was assured.

Jones continued to struggle, as near as it was possible to be to destitution without falling into the pit. One or two editors were kind and kept him afloat with commissions for articles and stories, but the second book remained unpublished. That morning, as he finished his article and prepared to take it round to the offices of
The Jermyn Street Gazette
, Jones was feeling particularly bitter. His wife Mary had taken their daughter Sophie for a visit to her mother in Peckham. She had said it was because they needed a change of air, but he knew it was because he was too poor to feed them. If only the world rewarded merit rather than the meretricious!

Jones began to wonder what he would do if he met his rival Slade in the street on his way to
The Gazette
. Would he pretend to ignore him, or deliberately cut him dead? The one thing he would not do would be to allow him to condescend to him. If he managed to see him without being seen perhaps he might secretly follow him, and then, if the opportunity arose — what would he do?

There was a knock at his door. Believing it to be Mrs Crace, his landlady, who had perhaps come to favour him with some cutting remarks about the rent, Jones did not immediately respond.

‘Gentleman to see you, Mr Jones,’ said the voice of Mrs Crace from the other side of the door. Her surprisingly respectful tones indicated that the gentleman in question had impressed her as a person of substance. Good God, what if it were Slade? The unlikely possibility filled him with terror, but he controlled himself and asked her to show him in. Mrs Crace opened the door and announced his visitor.

‘Mr Honeyburn,’ she said. The name was mercifully unfamiliar.

The man who had been announced as Mr Honeyburn wore a black Inverness cape and a Homburg hat which he immediately doffed upon entering. Jones was not surprised that Mrs Crace, who was even now withdrawing from the scene, had been impressed. Everything about Mr Honeyburn was large, rich, and powerful.

He was in his fifties, dark and, though heavily built, still handsome. He wore his curling, grizzled hair slightly long and his swarthy, aquiline features suggested Middle Eastern, perhaps Levantine origins. His superbly tailored clothes were dark and sober; but the heavy gold watch chain, the diamond stock pin and an emerald ring hinted at foreign flamboyance.

‘My dear Mr Jones, I must apologise for intruding upon you like this,’ he said. The voice was deep, resonant, and without a trace of an accent. ‘My name is Jonas Honeyburn.’ With a flourish he produced a card from his waistcoat and presented it to Jones.

As Jones took it he asked Mr Honeyburn to pray be seated, then, as an afterthought, offered to take his cape. Mr Honeyburn shook his head, as it was a cool March morning and there was no fire in the grate. Mr Honeyburn methodically placed his hat on Jones’s writing table and in it the pair of yellow kid gloves which he had been carrying; then he laid his ebony cane upon the table beside his hat. Jones noticed that the ivory handle was carved to look like the head of some primitive birdlike creature. Having performed these careful actions, Mr Honeyburn settled himself in the seat indicated.

Jones thought of inviting Mr Honeyburn to take some refreshment, but did not know if there was any to offer. Jones was in some ways an unworldly man, but he knew enough of the world to realise that he should not show Mr Honeyburn how desperate he was.

‘Just finishing a piece for
The Jermyn Street Gazette
,’ he said, casually waving his hand in the direction of his papers. ‘Can I help you, Mr Honeyburn?’

‘I am a great admirer of your work, Mr Jones,’ said Mr Honeyburn.

‘How kind of you to say so. Which work in particular?’ As Jones asked this question he thought he detected a small hint of hesitation pass over Mr Honeyburn’s confident, carven features.

‘Your story, “The Shining Road”, and—ah—
Pale Hills
. Remarkable . . .  But, Mr Jones, let me waste no more of your valuable time. I am a publisher——’

‘You wish to publish my work?’ said Jones, inadvertently displaying his eagerness.