The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (11 page)

Monica and Maeve went into the kitchen to make the tea while I looked round. It was a low, oak beamed room warmed by an open fire. Maeve’s taste for richly coloured fabrics manifested itself in wall hangings, rugs, cushions and drapings over furniture. A collection of crystals, quartzes and semi-precious stones was ranged along the mantelpiece; books on the occult crammed the bookcase. Over the mantelpiece hung an astrological chart. I guessed why I was there and braced myself for the ordeal ahead.

When Maeve and Monica came back into the room with the tea, Monica said: ‘You may as well know. Maeve is a psychic.’ I nodded.

‘I think he realised that,’ said Maeve.

‘You can leave now if you want to. I won’t mind,’ said Monica.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to?’

This challenge seemed to amuse Maeve; behind Monica’s back she made silent clapping gestures at me. ‘I think you’ve underestimated your writer friend,’ she said. I was not sure that she had because I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.

As we drank our blackcurrant leaf tea (odd but palatable) the talk ranged over a number of esoteric subjects: tarot cards, astrology, crystals. I did my best to hide my scepticism, but not my ignorance, while Monica revealed herself as an eager disciple and Maeve played the expert. Eventually the moment came when Monica said: ‘Maeve has helped me to contact Eleanor on the other side.’

Though I knew that something like this was coming it was still a shock. However much we read, whatever we believe, the idea of death as the impenetrable barrier persists in most of us. Any apparent breach excites horror or incredulity, or, as in my case, a confused mixture of the two.

Having absorbed the shock I asked what evidence there was that it was Eleanor. Monica said that the messages, transmitted to her by Maeve, either by automatic writing or by reported speech through a spirit guide, had given her details about Eleanor’s life which only Eleanor could give. I had no chance to ask what that meant because Monica then announced that Maeve would be trying to contact Eleanor tonight.

‘Right, well, let’s get going, shall we?’ said Maeve briskly as she settled herself into an armchair. She asked Monica to light some candles and extinguish the lights. The room became warmer and the atmosphere almost suffocating because the candles—great fat hand-made things—were heavily scented. Maeve was wedged into her chair, her hands gripping the arms and her head thrust back. Her eyes were screwed shut, her mouth half open, a look of intense concentration on her face. Her breathing was stertorous, but I did not feel she was asleep. Monica knelt beside her, holding one of her hands, looking intently into her face. Twenty minutes passed; I found myself on the point of falling asleep.

What prevented me was a sudden and pronounced fall in the room’s temperature. It was extraordinarily disquieting because there was nothing to indicate its cause. The temperature drop did not come from anywhere; there was no draught. The candles burned with a steady flame, still giving off their heavy scent, now made nauseous by the chill; logs still glowed in the open fire. Every sense except one told me that it should be warm. Monica looked at me triumphantly.

When Maeve began to talk, her voice was lower than it had been before her trance but otherwise no different. At first came a mere jumble of words and syllables, slurred and indistinct. Gradually the words began to form themselves into sentences, but there seemed to be very little sense in them. They might have come out of a dream. I remember her saying: ‘The Devil was on the wrong side, or rather the other side of the water, but he came right by the well-known favourite miracle of changing his faces.’ That sentence, like so many others, seemed to hover on the brink of meaning, even profundity. I saw that Monica was concentrating hard, as if she was trying to capture its evasive significance. I wanted to keep the words out of my mind, as I had the feeling that if I paid them too much attention they would suck all the sense out of my head and leave behind an imbecile.

Maeve’s enunciation became more distinct as what she said became more comprehensible. Her voice started to describe the situation in which it found itself. The description it gave was at once detailed and bafflingly vague. It said that she was on a ledge of black rock half way down a deep ‘hole’. The voice said it was a hole, but from other things she said, it would seem to be more like a chasm several miles wide. There were people at the top of the hole who were shouting at her. These people the voice interpreted as hostile though she admitted that they said they wanted to help her. The voice said she was not going to listen to these ‘shouters’, as she called them, until she had communicated a message to the world. There was a pause and I asked the voice who she was.

‘Eleanor,’ she said.

‘Is there anything you want to say to us?’

‘Justice,’ said Eleanor. ‘The shouters want me to go, but I can’t go until I have my justice. They call me guilty. I was not guilty. I have been abused. My name has been abused. I will not let go until they stop abusing me. There’s a man here abusing me. His play. His play is abusing me. Get out! Get out!’ The last words were spoken in a sort of guttural bark, like a savage animal. I immediately walked out of the room into the night outside.

After the strange unnatural chill indoors, it was warm in the garden. The air was free of human (and inhuman) tensions. I wandered about inhaling the soothing scents of Maeve’s herb garden. When I had done this I walked back to the cottage and looked through the window. I was relieved to see that Maeve was no longer in a trance, but sitting up and being given sips of blackcurrant leaf tea by Monica. She seemed pale and disturbed. When I walked back into the cottage she looked at me resentfully.

‘Where have you been?’ she said. The room was stiflingly hot again.

‘I had to get out.’

Monica refused to look at me, but sniffed her contempt; Maeve merely nodded. She said: ‘Something bad happened, didn’t it? I don’t remember anything. That’s unusual. I generally remember something. What happened?’

‘Nothing really, said Monica. ‘Eleanor got mad at him, that’s all.’

‘Why?’ asked Maeve.

‘Because he’s going to slag her off,’ said Monica. ‘In this play he’s writing. He’s going to abuse her.’ It struck me then that Eleanor’s voice had talked a lot about ‘abuse’, employing the word in a strangely modern way.

Maeve asked me if I was going to abuse Eleanor in my play and I said I was going to tell the truth. There was a pause and then I added the words: ‘as I see it.’

‘I don’t think we’d better hold any more sessions,’ said Maeve. ‘This is getting out of hand. We may already have gone too far.’ I asked Maeve what she meant by her last comment, but she refused to be drawn.

Monica drove me back to my guest room at the university in silence. It seemed to me that the séance with Maeve had brought to an end my relationship, such as it was, with Monica. She had taken Eleanor Marchant’s side and made me into the enemy. I did not think this fair, and I wanted us to part on friendly terms; so, when Monica had stopped the car to drop me off, I said I had a present for her.

They were the first words to be spoken since we had left Maeve’s and Monica shrank back from me as if I had made a pass at her. I took the piece of tile from Grove House out of my pocket, explained its origin and gave it to her. Monica looked at the little square object in her hand suspiciously.

‘Why are you giving this to me?’

‘I thought you’d like to have it. You could use it as a paperweight while you’re writing your book.

‘But what is it you’re trying to say?’

‘I hoped we could still be friends.’

Monica said ‘Okay’, then bent over and kissed my cheek. I was startled. Suddenly the time and the place became very vivid. The warm impression of her lips remained. I thanked her, got out of the car and made my way to the guest room.

**

This is a story of false endings. I delivered my script to the BBC and it was accepted. I thought that my involvement with Monica and Miss Marchant was now over. That is what I thought; what I felt was different. I cannot claim that this was some kind of psychic intuition of what was to come; it is much more likely to have been connected with sex plain and simple. Monica’s kiss had stayed with me. Of course, it was absurd, but that is how it is. If we had gone to bed together I might have got her out of my system. It was the fragility of the connection we had made which captivated my mind.

A new term had begun—I taught English to foreign students to keep body and soul together—and I was walking back one evening to my flat from Tufnell Park tube. I had washed the day’s events out of my mind and I was planning an evening of reading and writing. My eye was caught by a car which was parked opposite the entrance to my flat because someone was sitting in it. I have always been slightly disturbed by the sight of people sitting in parked cars. I suspect that they are spying or contemplating suicide, or otherwise up to no good. I took a closer look and saw that the occupant of the car was Monica. I went over and tapped on the window.

She was staring straight ahead, a slight frown on her face and did not respond immediately to my tapping. When she did she seemed indignant and wound down the window.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked querulously. I replied by asking her the same question. She looked confused for a moment, then she said: ‘I want to know what you’re doing about Eleanor. I want to read your play. I know you’re slagging her off.’

She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. I felt ashamed and helpless. I lied to her, saying that all copies of the play were either with my agent or the BBC, and that my computer was down so I could not print her out a copy at the moment.

‘You must send a copy to me as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘Will you do that?’ I hesitated. ‘Please! It’s terribly important.’

‘Did you drive all the way down from Dorset to tell me this?’ I asked. Monica looked confused.

‘This is very important,’ she said.

‘Come in and have a cup of tea. Let’s talk about this.’

‘No. I can’t stop.’

‘Please, Monica!’ I tried to open the car door. She screamed and started the car. I let go of the door just in time to prevent myself being dragged into the road. The next moment the car had gone.

A week passed. I did not send Monica my script and sustained myself with the futile hope that everything would ‘blow over’. It did not.

One afternoon, as I was teaching, I was called out of my class. It was the police on the phone. A young woman had been seen breaking into my flat and had been apprehended. She was claiming that I knew her. I asked if the woman’s name was Monica Freede and was surprised to be told that it was not.

‘She says her name is Eleanor Marchant,’ came the matter-of-fact voice on the end of the phone. ‘Would you know her, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know Eleanor Marchant. I’m coming over.’ I felt like a man drowning.

When I arrived at the police station Monica was sitting in an interview room. At first I recognised her only from the clothes she was wearing. Her auburn hair had been scraped back into a crude bun; it was greasy and almost dark brown in colour. Something had happened to her face too. It was as if a hand had taken hold of it and subtly twisted it out of shape. I noticed that her mouth, wider than before, was pulled down at the corners in a way that reminded me of the photograph of Eleanor Marchant in Broadmoor.

When she saw me a brief look of recognition and relief registered on her face, to be replaced a moment later by a sullen glare.

‘We caught her with a tin of lighter fuel,’ said the W.P.C. in charge of her. ‘It looked as if she was going to burn the place down.’

‘Hello, Monica,’ I said, but there was no reply.

I told the police that I had no wish to press any charges, and that I would take responsibility for her. They made no objections; in fact they seemed positively relieved to have her off their hands. A sympathetic officer took me aside and told me rather superfluously that ‘Miss Marchant’ needed help. I heard another officer mutter something which included the phrase ‘gives me the creeps’.

Monica came with me silently and without resistance. I drove her back to my flat, gave her coffee which she drank and asked her questions to which she failed to reply. Sometimes she stared at me balefully; sometimes her face assumed a distracted expression, her eyes wandering uncontrollably, as if she was engaged in some deep mental conflict. At the end of one of these fits she quite suddenly fell asleep. As she did so her face relaxed and took on something of its normal beauty. With difficulty I carried her through into the next room and laid her on my bed.

The sight of her so helpless filled me with a feeling very like love, but I still had no idea how to help her. Only one idea occurred to me which was that Maeve, whom I was beginning to tell myself was responsible for ‘all this’, should find us a way out. Fortunately Monica’s address book was in her bag which had been left at the flat when she was caught. Though I had not remembered Maeve’s surname it did not take long to find her: she was under ‘M’ and, besides, the address book was quite sparsely populated.

With one eye on the sleeping shape of Monica in the next room I telephoned Maeve. She answered the telephone eventually in a drugged voice as if she had been asleep. It was four in the afternoon and she appeared to be irritated by my call. I said I was worried about Monica.

‘What’s that got to do with me?’ she said.

‘I thought you were her friend.’

‘So are you.’

‘I think she’s possessed.’

There was a long pause, then: ‘Are you serious?’

I replied irritably that of course I was serious, though looking at the peacefully sleeping Monica in my bedroom I began to doubt. After a little further argument we agreed that I should drive Monica down to Maeve’s cottage that night. I received the distinct impression that Maeve had no more idea of what to do than I.

I had difficulty in waking Monica, and even then she remained in a semi-comatose state while I got her to the car. By this time it was getting dark. Monica was disposed to sleep during the journey and I was happy to let her, but it was a strange, lonely drive down to Dorset.