Satan Wants Me (16 page)

As I staggered about on the lawn, I kept going over the argument about hippies and I kept thinking of extra crushing things I might have said. People like Julian talk as if hippies ran the country and as if everything that happens happens either in Carnaby Street or Kings Road. But the England I live in is not run by long-haired youths operating out of the Arts Lab or a recording studio. It is run from big offices by people who are old or middle-aged. Sixties Britain, like fifties Britain, like forties Britain, is run by company directors, generals, bishops, MPs, bank managers and wardens of colleges, and if anything is going wrong in sixties Britain, it is their fault, not my fault, or the fault of the Beatles. I wish the streets were crowded with young men in colourful, flowery shirts. In fact, England is amazingly dowdy and repressed. One travels a long way to find sitar music or a Dr Strange comic, but Brylcream, Typhoo tea and Woodbines cigarettes are everywhere at hand. It is like living in a continuous drizzle. If there is to be a hippy revolution, let it come soon.

Let what come soon? Let the storm from the East come, and, hurrying ahead of the storm, the raggle-taggle, Bohemian rout of the hippies, marching or dancing beside their wagons to the rhythm of oriental drums. Their banners are decorated with tantric sigils. Their faces are tattooed with boasts of sexual slavery. The hippies have started on their bad trip towards the cities of Christendom. The wheels of their wagons break the limbs of those of their number whom drink and drugs have made insensible to the pains of living, but, though many are lost in such a fashion, this hardly matters, for the legions of hippydom are so numerous and there are always more of them coming up from underground to join the crusade of eternal children. There are boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys and many of both sexes who are dressed in nothing at all. This is no ordinary march; it is a perpetual party, which moves through clouds of incense and butterflies. Menacing outriders scavenge the wherewithal for the travelling festivities, while grapes, intoxicants, candles, dildoes, and kisses are passed from laughing person to laughing person down the dancing line of march. Everything is free, including their bodies. The hippies’ faces are flushed and their eyes are glazed, but they are pleasant to look upon, for they are still young. Their uprising is instinctive and beyond all reason, a locust invasion of Western civilization. They are coming in their broad-brimmed hats, Indian scarves and leather boots and, though they are still far away, I already hear cries of ‘An end to Church and King!’ and the jingle of little bells, and, behind that, the throbbing bass notes of the dance of Yama, the Death-God. Let them come, the wild horde from the East and, after them, the dark rains. Bright Lucifer welcomes his people.

This last paragraph is a bit weird. It came oozing out of my biro without me thinking. It certainly is not what I was thinking on the lawn last night. It is a kind of automatic writing, I suppose. I must watch out for this, or I could be taken over by this freaky sort of prose style.

What freaky prose style? The Devil with style! And huzzah for freakshows! There is, it may readily be conceived, a kind of prose whose slow-falling cadences make it serviceable for the investigation of such curiosities as the half-understood funerary practices of pagan English antiquity, as well as for the sombre digressions which may arise from such an inquiry. In the same manner, it is sure that the perverted sports of Tiberius and his ephebes are best related in a language which resorts to the veiled licence to obscenity afforded by ironic periphrasis; the long exhalation of a dying fall will best evoke the slaughter of the victims of imperial lust, as well as the final requitus of the emperor himself. For this is a style whose blend of formality and innuendo panders to depravity, by speaking of vice with grace and circumspection. Its marmoreal sentences have been crafted against criticism. Lovers of fine writing may be seduced by fastidious diction into applauding opiate fantasies of child prostitution in the slums of London, or philosophical investigations into the nature of adultery conducted by cosmopolitan Alexandrian debauchees. Baroque paragraphs of balanced antitheses reverberate with internal echoes, symmetries and parallels. So death is a play upon words and crime a pretext for ornamental disguise. Witty
doubles entendres
allude to the seduction of the innocent or the desecration of graveyards, while yet simultaneously denying that any matter of weight is being written of. Words fall like snow upon a wasteland empty of moral meaning. Punctuation is like breathing and, in such a passage as this, one can hear the Devil breathing.

There it is again! My hand mocks me by writing about itself. But I now force it, against its will, to scribble the line, ‘If thine right hand offend thee cut it off.’ Having been threatened with the biblical sanction, my hand is under my control again and writing what I want.

No. I did not think about the Wild Horde from the East nor did I hear the Devil’s breath last night. Instead, having dealt with Julian’s rubbish to my own satisfaction, I started to think about what I should do about Dad’s message regarding my dying mother. There was no way I could leave this remote place last night. Apart from anything else, I was too drunk. Tomorrow morning would be Sunday. To undertake the journey from the backwoods of Herefordshire to Cambridge by public transport on a Sunday would be incredibly wearisome, if it was possible at all. Being honest with myself, I had to recognise that I found the idea of sitting beside the sickbed of a querulous old woman deeply unattractive. There were also grounds for suspicion. Dad was angry at me for postponing my weekend visit to them and so he was manufacturing this health crisis to get back at me. He was trying to claim his emotional pound of flesh. If I gave way on this, his first test would be followed by other tests. My mother was an emotional encumbrance and, on the path of the sorcerer, one cannot afford encumbrances. What I needed more than anything else was to learn to obey my own true will.

Having made all these points to myself, I then realised that they were exactly the sorts of points that Felton would have made to me, but he no longer needed to make them, for it was as if I had my own Felton growing in my brain. My meditation about sickbeds and bus-journeys to Cambridge, not to mention Felton in the brain, had quite ruined my epiphanic moment. It was gone beyond retrieval and so I went back inside.

I found them in the smoking-room. Felton was going over Julian’s diary, just like he does with mine. There was stuff in it about Julian’s recent attempt to escape the surveillance of Mr Dunn, the butler. This was obviously going to be interesting. So I stretched out on a chaise-longue, eager to hear extracts from Julian’s diary read out as some kind of bed-time story. Unfortunately I fell instantly asleep. I have no idea how I eventually ended up in my proper bedroom.

I was awoken by the cry of peacocks on the lawn. It is all very grand and beautiful, but I now realise that Maddiscombe Hall is a kind of mental hospital with just one patient, Julian. There was of course no breakfast until the service to Aiwass had been celebrated. So I lay in bed, writing my diary and brooding about what had been said yesterday. Up to a point, Julian is right about the subject-matter of today’s pop-music, though ‘copulation – nothing but’ is putting it too crudely. But the songs are about love and hardly anything except love. Taken as a whole, the canon of pop songs constitutes a kind of encyclopedia of modern love: loveless loneliness, love at first sight, chatting up, shyness, the first date and the first kiss, all the way through to breaking up, trying to make up and, finally, looking back on lost love across the years. The mnemonic rhymes and rhythms of pop music tell us how to comport ourselves in our mating rituals, what to say and how to feel. The lyrics annotate the movements of our hearts. The hippy revolution is love, plus songs, plus electricity.

Julian is right too about hippies being effeminate. So is a lot of the pop music. Consider The Who’s ‘I’m a Boy’. But surely it is a good thing to be effeminate? On the subject of sex, assuming reincarnation is true as Cosmic says it is, I have always wondered why do so many souls, just over half of them, choose to be reincarnated as females rather than males?

The Invocation to Aiwass was held in the deconsecrated oratory which is next to the house. A statue of Ahriman stands where the Christian altar once was. Serpents coil round Ahriman’s contorted body. A couple of local members of the Lodge drove in for the service of Invocation. Most of the Magick rituals I have participated in so far have been pretty boring. (Which fool was it who said that the Devil has all the best tunes? Not someone acquainted with the rituals of Crowleyanite Magick. I have yet to hear anything to match ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, or ‘Jerusalem’.) This service was only enlivened by the escape of the goat before Felton could take the razor to its windpipe. So, while Julian, standing beside Ahriman, continued to intone the names of the astral servants of Aiwass, the rest of us were chasing the goat between the benches. Finally, Granville lunged for its haunches in a kind of rugby tackle and managed to hold it, until Felton was able to get his hands on its halter. The red-eyed goat, the embodiment of baleful maleficence, had its throat slit to consecrate a forthcoming ‘Consecration of the Virgin’, whatever that may be, and, as on previous occasions, we all drank the blood of the sacrificed beast.

To breakfast on goat’s blood is not a pleasant experience. Fortunately, this was followed by a proper breakfast back in the house. I had kedgeree and black pudding – the first time I have ever had these things. My enjoyment was slightly spoilt by Felton coming up behind me and remarking that my poor old mother was probably going to get better quicker without me dancing attendance upon her.

After breakfast, Felton had Julian show me over the house and its grounds. This Julian did without any enthusiasm. He was rather like a bored estate-agent showing an unlikely customer round the place. It was a big property, but there was nothing to interest me particularly, except that I noticed that all the upstairs windows had bars on them. Our tour ended up in the gun-room. Julian got Mr Dunn to unlock one of the cupboards and Felton and Granville joined us and we all went out to do some clay-pigeon shooting beyond the tennis courts. Then there was lunch. After lunch, Felton slipped me coins with which to tip the butler and we all went off to collect our bags. I was first back down into the hallway where Julian was waiting and looking just as depressed and anxious as when I first met him. I offered my hand to him and prepared myself to utter some words of conventional thanks for his hospitality. But instead he thanked me, albeit in a somewhat half-hearted way.

‘I suppose I should be grateful to you. You are the one who is going to set me free,’ he said, but he did not take the proffered hand.

(Obviously Julian loathes the sight of me. Here is another person who, like Alice, hates my guts. It is oddly disturbing to experience oneself as hateable. And maybe now Sally has also joined the club of Peter-haters. I do not like to think about this. Yet I will think about it – just like I think about sliding down the razor-sharpened banister.)

In the car on the way back to London, Felton casually asked me,

‘Would you really like to be a hippy, Peter?’

‘No. It was a debating point. Julian just got on my nerves that’s all.’

‘Good, the Lodge has no need for hippies, or any other kind of drop-out. What the Lodge wants is people in positions of influence. It is prepared to make great sacrifices and to wait a long time in order to get its chosen candidates in the right places. As a drop-out, you would be useless to us, Peter. We want you to have a job, to marry and have children.’

Then casually,

‘What did you make of Julian?’

‘Well -’

I hesitated and he, seeing this, laughed. ‘Oh don’t bother. I will find out soon enough after I read your diary entries for the weekend.’

‘Actually, I did not care for him very much and I don’t think he likes me either.’

‘Perhaps you will change your mind when you learn that he has decided to make you his heir. The house, the estate, the money, it will all go to you.’

Are Felton and Granville pulling my leg? I did not exactly get the impression from Julian that I was the son he wished he had had but never did have. All the same, it was a good fantasy and I sank back into my seat and imagined what it would be like to inherit Julian’s house. It would be fun to turn the place into a hippy colony, where all we freaks would be waited on by butlers and maidservants. We could turn over the maids, while the butlers might service the chicks with our permission. Then the servants would pass round post-coital joints on silver trays. In the summer there would be marquees on the lawns for rock concerts. Upper-class living is wasted on the stuffy upper-classes; only the hippy really knows how to get full value out of pleasure … Then there was Julian’s remark about me being ‘the chosen one’; this was the springboard for another fantasy about me being the Hippy Messiah. That has a fine apocalyptic ring, does it not? I should play the guitar like Dylan, heal the sick and make the dead walk again.

From there I drifted on to thinking about the difference between hippy and beatnik. Robert Drapers claims to be a beatnik. That is why he wears black roll-neck pullovers. Also he reads depressing existentialists and claims to suffer
nausée
and
angst
and other things with foreign names. He really is ‘beat’ in the sense that life seems to have beaten him. Whereas I really am more interested in the hippy thing. Beats strike me as being really pretty straight. I have seen a photo of the archetypal beatnik, Jack Kerouac. He has short hair and he is standing on the porch of his mother’s house, wearing a check shirt and drinking beer from a bottle. He could be auditioning for a part in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. I mean, how straight can you get?

With a jerk, I suddenly remembered something which all the business of the last few days – what with the move, the break with Sally, my father’s telephone calls and the country house weekend – had driven out of my mind. I had to go to a conference on the sociology of cognition at Leeds the following day. A couple of weeks ago I had even prepared a paper on ‘Cognitive Dissonance in Children’s Play Fantasies’ and I was supposed to be giving it on Monday afternoon. I told Felton about this. I thought that maybe he would forbid me from going to the conference as well, but it was all right with him.