The Whispering Swarm (29 page)

‘And have you no hint of what he fears?'

‘Hope you never discover.' She loved teasing me in that way. I could be quickly irritated by her constant flirting evasions.

Every day I remembered, with increasing bad conscience, that I still had a wife and children to support. At least at first Moll didn't seem to mind me spending the time I needed to bang out a book or two or write the odd feature. She seemed content just to be around, doing a bit of drawing, serving in the bar, going shopping, getting us an evening meal. Playing house. Much of the rest of the time we smoked hashish or sniffed coke and made love, still determinedly in the throes of first passionate romance.

One evening, when she came up late after serving in the bar, she was amused to find I had painted some Britain's toy soldiers I'd bought in a back-street shop. They were an elaborately uniformed Indian Cavalry regiment from the mid-1920s in bright reds, yellows and greens. How they had ever got into the shop I couldn't think. I was fascinated by British colonial uniforms but had absolutely no interest in warfare. I used to say I was more interested in what caused wars. Painting those wonderful uniforms, using little pots of enamel and tiny brushes, helped me think and work out stories.

Moll smiled. ‘Another man would be growing bored by now. Don't you feel confined by Alsacia's crowded streets?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘perhaps I'm too patient. I feel stimulated. You're my muse.' I had belted out three new Meg Midnight books in a new series. Twelve days' work. I was worn out.

Prostitution, she said. She didn't like me writing commercial fiction, particularly when it was about a fictionalised version of herself! To celebrate finishing the books, I was smoking a monstrous spliff she had rolled.

I needed the money and she knew it. ‘If you don't want me to go on writing hack books, you might want to get back to the Steel Toby,' I suggested, remembering our raid on the tram. ‘After all, I'm supporting two and a half households.' But I had enjoyed doing the books, I won't lie. There had been no demands in writing them. Smooth as silk, I said.

In so many ways this was an idyll, taking me away from all my emotional responsibilities. I hadn't worked so easily and at such a speed even at my fastest, not since I left my mother's. My only fear was of not being able to leave there. I wanted to know
how
Alsacia existed. And my curiosity threatened to separate me from my children. That was my main concern. I was, I was forced to admit, increasingly homesick. But I would be missing them more if I were in America. Or even out of London. I was faintly surprised then that I called Ladbroke Grove home. I still did and still do.

I made an effort to recall how terrible my marriage could sometimes be, remembering my awful fits of temper taken out on innocent inanimate things in a shower of broken glass, pottery, woodwork and angrily twisted metal. Arguments in which I fought like a gorilla, constantly growling, displaying my strength as I backed away, never engaging in straightforward war. I hated violence. I hated threatening those weaker than myself, even if it was inadvertent. The anxieties were entirely to do with work. During those tantrums I became a horrible, monstrous child. Moll knew how to calm me down and I loved her for that. By treating me like a child she helped me check myself and behave like an adult. At other times she simply sucked my cock.

‘I think the Restoration architects imagined the whole thing on classical lines so that as you approached from below you would walk up vistas of columns, trees and statuary. But commerce won, of course. Like so many British dreams of order, that one dream was eventually realised in Washington. Which in turn became the most glorious temple to Mammon the world had ever seen. Yet I have such a massive emotional investment in all it was supposed to mean. Hitler finished much of the work the Great Fire began!'

‘I know.' Moll hugged my arm. ‘You're hallucinating, aren't you? How big was that last hit? Won't you help them? They are all brave men of great resourcefulness. They need your special senses.'

I thought she must have taken a much bigger hit than I had! Why on earth would she suddenly ask me to join in a plot I'd almost be ashamed to offer in one of my Meg Midnight books? I found myself laughing. ‘I'm not sure what's involved but I'm pretty certain my life insurance wouldn't pay up on it,' I said. I was an obsessive buyer of life insurance even then. I couldn't bear to think of Helena and the kids left like the family of so many writers I had known. Then Moll continued to chat on as normal. Ladies love normal. When they don't love weird. Chat, chat, calm, calm. Almost sent you to sleep. ‘Alsacia offers so much but needs so much from us. And you can get lost—beyond our walls. Lost forever.…'

‘Yet I used to lose the way
here,
' I reminded her. ‘I feared I would never again be able to find my way back to the Sanctuary. And now I'm afraid I won't be able to get back to the kids.'

We had gone out on to the balcony for air. Either she understood or she made a very good pretence of it. I was alone and almost all that I loved had gone from London. Lost to me, invisible. London, my London, seemed as hard to enter as heaven itself. Radiant Time. Did each different ray carry me further and further away? I had chosen the securities of a simplified past. I thought of Father Grammaticus and what he had told me. Time fans out from the massive and mysterious black star. She was here, with me. Here. No terrible future had opened up and gulped us down. We were safe. We could always get back. This was only one of many timelines. I could not lose my children. Who could pursue us into this version of the past? We had good and powerful friends who were inducting us into their secrets, perhaps preparing us to become adepts. ‘So why do I have these terrors?'

‘Dope,' she said. I missed her meaning. She did not elaborate. ‘Yes, you're absolutely right, dear.' She stood up on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Hard to find and harder to leave, we say. But as to a proper scientific explanation of the phenomenon, which I know has good logic to support its existence, for that, darling, you'll have to ask someone else.' She had never called me darling before. A violet wink. ‘I don't have the brains for it. The brothers and a few Cavaliers are the educated ones here. There's Friar Isidore crossing the quadrangle. Look!'

I told her I would see her later and on impulse off I went like a terrier after a ball. Down the outside steps from the gallery to the street and over the cobbles in pursuit.

I eventually caught up with Friar Isidore a few yards away from the abbey walls. Although reluctant to make a formal call on him I had been hoping to bump into him casually. He was delighted to see me. His thin, delicate skin rustled loudly and I was worried for him until I realised he'd hidden some papers in his sleeve. He showed me a glimpse of what looked like a freshly illuminated manuscript: gold, scarlet, blue and glowing green. He smelled faintly of mint and roses. And linseed oil.

As I panted for breath he waited patiently. Then I explained how I now had friends in the Sanctuary and was no longer merely a visitor, having made a home here. But as a new and enthusiastic resident I was curious about it all and wanted to know the secret of Alsacia's strange and stable position. How, for instance, could it be approached from the river? Invisibility existed only in stories and I'd grown out of
The Wizard of Oz
. I discounted any supernatural explanation. There had to be a physical one. Were we—or most of us—quite literally its creations? Our ancestors could well have known far more than we did, and been closer to the truth. A pantheon! Think of that. Odin and Freya and Loki, Thor and the rest, each with their favourites, like the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. I was born into the first atomic age. Like Oppenheimer, say, I was a rationalist fascinated by metaphysics. What kind of bargain had the occupants of the Alsacia struck with some pantheon of superior beings? Was that bargain theoretically possible? I considered all the baroque language and images, the ritual and the colour of a fashion long passed. The very symbol of what rationalists hated? Overcomplicated? Or too simple?

‘Why are so few able to find the Sanctuary? And what about the children? Why do adults live so long?' All these questions and speculations tumbled out of me.

He almost retreated in the face of my urgency. ‘Master Michael, I am a simple monk. I am guided by our Creator. I know little of these questions. I live by my faith, not my intellect.' He smiled, his eyes as mild as always. ‘We await the Conjunction of the Days. Then, I understand, all our questions will be answered.'

‘The Days?' I asked. But he had scurried off. He did not want to be confronted. It sounded like some kind of apocalyptic visionary notion. In the 1950s and '60s we had relatively few big cults or pseudoreligious groups. We tended to reject them, being deeply suspicious of them, from the Flat Earth Society to the Rosicrucians. Even in America, land of so many fake philosophers, Ayn Rand was still small beer, seen as the loony she was, and associated by most with the reactionary neofascist John Birch Society. Scientology and the rest had yet to offer the illusion of effect to large numbers of unhappy men and women. They were still down in East Grinstead, not yet, for the sake of the taxman, calling themselves a ‘religion' but a ‘science'. We were only at the very beginning of the new Age of Superstition. The Scientologists and flying-saucer nuts were mostly only known to the science fiction community, who were generally pretty sceptical, too. Religion was something we identified with Victorians and their forebears. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, even Marx had introduced us to scientific rationalism and we had felt a cleansing wind blowing across the world. But had reaction already set in? The reforming '60s were to become an environment of superstition, nostalgia and sentiment. Progress would prove lucrative!

I'm still not quite sure how or when the '60s became an age of uncertainty, when crooks and charlatans suspended our disbelief, exploited a public made gullible by a series of astonishing ventures into space, when amazing advances in democracy and the popular arts combined with shocking barbarism in southern Asia. Even a sceptic like my uncle Fred, before he died, began to talk about there being a lot of truth in stuff I still considered gobbledegook. I made my income by appealing to people's sense of wonder. I was a professional liar. I knew how it was done. And how easily it could be manufactured. I respected people's imaginations as much as their bodies. I wouldn't ever want to steal someone's faith or their crutches.

Sometimes Alsacia reminded me of my days in mass-produced fiction, when dozens of us created new characters and their backgrounds. We committed to a common illusion. We worked like they did in the old film studios. At the moment the Alsacia picture lacked a quality of authenticity, maybe? It only began to assume complexity. I felt a chill. It couldn't be a trap? The Days? The phrase was faintly familiar.

Apart from the monks, I didn't know anyone else in the Alsacia who might have a reasonable scientific idea of how the place preserved itself. I would have like to have heard any kind of explanation, however far-fetched. Duval advised me to ask Prince Rupert when he returned from France and the Low Countries. They said he vainly attempted to raise an army to free his king. If my reading of history was right, that wasn't going to happen. Assuming our history was the same!

I continued to work. They had begun to call me a fiction factory. I had kids to feed. Maybe because I was now living there but still had an outside connection, I could, unlike most of the inhabitants of the Alsacia, come and go as I wished. I soon arranged with Helena to visit the kids regularly. I took them to the pictures, to the zoo and the various parks and museums. Their mother seemed reasonably content, getting on with a new novel, living quietly, she said.

When I wasn't enjoying Moll's company I was writing another tale that was one part Jung, one part Freud and one part pulp. Nobody spotted it. I wasn't cynical about writing the stories, just about selling them. The outline had been approved. Sometimes I would go to the Westminster Reference Library, the London Library or the British Museum Reading Room and look for what I could find about Alsacia. Certainly no existing mainstream theory even began to touch on the phenomenon of somewhere remotely resembling the Alsacia, let alone explain it. I read folk tales which described similar places like Les Hivers in Paris or Amstelsdorp in Amsterdam. Then, of course, there were the rural ‘fairy circles' and the like, where people disappeared and woke up days or years after they had disappeared. God knew how many of those there were! Only SF, or marginalised scientists like Haldane, would ever propose the existence of
pockets
of reality within a larger reality! Anomalies defining the generality.

Barry and I had discussed all this once, but marriage has a habit of discouraging abstract intellectualising. Older writers like Brian Aldiss and Jack Allard told me to lay off the wacky baccy. My contemporaries were interested and sympathetic, but were a bit sceptical when somehow I could never find the gates in their company, even though Barry had once slipped through ahead of me. Barry continued to believe me, but the trouble was very few people believed Barry. Everyone thought me an oddball genius pursuing all sorts of wild ideas. Where were the gates? Where the gates
should
be we'd see a neat pair of narrow eighteenth-century houses in Carmelite Inn Chambers. Lawyers' digs and offices. I'd even managed to get through to the back of one of the houses and seen a neat bit of lawn. I very easily doubted my own mind at those times.

If I had a healthy rationalism, common to my generation, I still loved a lot of the old, romantic stories. And so did my friends. It's what we shared with a previous generation.
The Big Sleep. Casablanca
. I needed someone like Barry to talk this over with. He had the most open mind, the most questing intelligence I ever knew, and could have helped me work out the puzzle, but unfortunately, soon after I began staying in the Alsacia, Barry and Dolores left for Birmingham to look after his sick dad. Even if he'd been sympathetic, Jack Allard was busy with his own concerns. He was planning some kind of pop-image exhibition and that was all he wanted to talk about. Max, my mentor and role model, was now permanently touring with a Hot Club of France tribute group, supporting George Melly. Temperamentally, he needed regular work. Rex Fisch and Jake Slade were back in the USA for the moment, raising dough; Lang Jones was newly married. Pete Taylor was fighting to save his marriage and other friends were drinking themselves to death in Spain, touring in mega rock bands, doing something brainy in academia, doing something romantic in Paris or pursuing errant lovers to Lima. Mervyn was in the Priory. I could never burden his wife, Maeve, with my problems. I had let all my other friends slowly slope off as I became less and less the man they recognised.