The Whispering Swarm (41 page)

Helena still refused to hear anything I tried to tell her about the Alsacia. Why did the Swarm stop whenever I was in the Alsacia? Did the Sanctuary actually call me back? A kind of Lorelei? By April 1969 it had grown so loud I definitely wasn't sure it was just tinnitus. I had to go to the doctor and make up a story about anxieties and symptoms like a migraine. But he gave me nothing strong enough to silence the Swarm. The downer, of course, just made me sleepy. I began to wonder if the Swarm could be escaped by putting a few thousand miles between us.

Helena thought we needed a break. The girls were now old enough to leave with my mum who was eager to have them to herself for a bit. Helena had never been to the United States and I needed to see my editors. In particular I also had to find a former writing partner and get our manuscript back. In 1968 a bright young American, Ray Soulis, began collaborating on a book about pop culture with me. An emergency at home in New York meant Ray had had to leave, taking the only manuscript with him. For some time he had dropped out of sight and I began to despair of seeing our book again. Then he wrote out of the blue. Damon Knight and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, had gone to Oregon to see two of their children and Ray had been asked to housesit for them. I must have known Ray better than they did. But Ray was going to be in Milford, Pennsylvania, for three months in the summer and suggested I come over to discuss what we were going to do with the book. To be honest, all I wanted was the bugger back so I could finish it and not be asked about it whenever I saw Livia Gollancz, who had commissioned it. Why, I proposed, didn't Helena and I go over, stay in New York, explore a few other parts of the Northeast and get hold of the manuscript?

We decided to go on a three-week return. Our first transatlantic plane trip together! Helena was already in love with America and didn't share the anti-Americanism which had become epidemic since the country's involvement in Vietnam. So I dashed to the Alsacia to tell Moll I had to be in New York on business. She suggested I look up her mother. Mrs Melody was there all year.

 

31

AMERICAN DIVERSIONS

Our trip would prove unexpectedly tiring. Somewhere between October 1967 and May 1969, America had discovered sex. Our first clue to this was being met at the Gramercy Park Hotel, Manhattan, by Rex Fisch.

Rex had left England in a sober suit, a shirt, a tie and a neat haircut. He arrived outside our hotel lobby in tiny black leather shorts and a studded bolero jacket, astride his monster twin-cam 1100cc BMW bike. All six feet two inches of him. As he swung off his bike and flounced towards us I knew the sight would never leave my memory. Only Rex could mince under the weight of that many metal studs. He clearly intended to shock us, but of course we had trouble not smiling. We would have enjoyed ourselves in New York the more if Rex hadn't begun showing signs of what would become one of his periodic attacks of paranoia.

I insisted on taking Helena to Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's where she reluctantly bought some beautiful clothes. We went up to the top of the Empire State Building and we took a boat ride around the island. Rex, dressed a little less like a Village Person, introduced us to some great restaurants. We went to the MoMA and the Strand bookstore. We enjoyed the Gramercy Park Hotel, which was at the height of her run-down glory and one of the cheapest, funkiest hotels in Manhattan. I preferred it by far to the Chelsea where Mrs Melody was staying. I had no intention of looking up Moll's mother! We found Port Authority Bus Terminal and off we went to Milford, where Ray awaited us. The bus was already packed so I sat down near the front and Helena took a seat near the back, causing sardonic comment from black passengers. Helena, with her posh English accent, still understood all that was being said and blithely ignored it until a black lady told off the men and made room for me. The law had changed but the culture hadn't. That would take a few more years.

We stayed at a creaking old Victorian four-decker mansion in what was then a near-deserted Pennsylvania town marked for flooding as a reservoir. The cabbie who drove us up there was so scared when he saw the house he gave us about five seconds to leave the taxi before he took off at speed. It did look a bit like the house in
Psycho
. I, of course, had been there before, but I hadn't arrived at night. Ray, skinny and neurotically stooped as ever, now wore a fashionable Zapata moustache. His eyes intense, he led us up to the third floor along creaking hallways and groaning stairs. I was already fond of the house but it freaked out some guests, including Ray's new girlfriend and her friend. Ray's wife and small son had been staying in the house for some time. They both had a strange, distant look. Helena and I soon realised that Ray had gone barking barmy. Not only had he invited another woman to stay, but he was already hitting on her friend.

After our first uncomfortable night and what was for most of us an awkward breakfast, we went to visit Rex and Jim Stephanopolis, who had recently rented a house nearby. Rex hadn't told us they were breaking up. So Rex decided to return with us to Ray's. We got back that afternoon to find even more people arriving. I was reminded of the opening act of a musical comedy. Ray had also given open invitations to a bunch of the most neurotic would-be writers and artists in the nation. They usually drifted in on Friday and stayed through to the following Monday. The exchanges of bodily fluids were so complex that Rex at one point joked that Jackie Kennedy was the father of his child. Avoiding advances from all sides exhausted us, but Rex was in his element, swanning about like a villainous Disney great white, sporting vast, grinning teeth. He would have had those gnashers filed if he hadn't been such a sissy about visiting the dentist.

The relationship complications lasted days and weeks, even months in some cases, feeding the gossip machines of New York, Paris, California and London. Apocryphal stories recycled for years, few of them as sensational as the truth. Helena's main complaint about our stay in the Delaware Valley was that she could never get into the toilet alone. When she did make it, there was usually someone there, hanging from the ceiling in a bizarre state of dress. If we hadn't already reached a sort of equilibrium that year we might have enjoyed it a little more. But we wanted to be together.

We couldn't have left anyway. Neither of us had a valid driving licence and there was some sort of transport strike. We were stranded in an amateur performance of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
without the music or the jokes. Mostly they wanted advice—or that was how it started. Now, tell me Michael, should I fuck Buck and chuck Huck and should I only suck Chuck or should I settle down and get stuck with all of them? Anyway, how are
you
fixed for now? We only had to sit in that one set, the kitchen, from which led a double staircase, until the next lugubrious guest would come down after a row or in search of water and almost immediately propose to you. What's more, most of the proposers were pretty unattractive. So we were stranded there until a train reached Middletown one Monday afternoon, signaling its imminent arrival from the bridge and causing us to flee down the hill to the station not caring what we left behind. Until then we'd had very little sleep. They'd given up invading our bed early on the second Friday evening, so that wasn't much of an issue during the last week or so. The worst thing was definitely the endless gossip and analysis. You couldn't get yourself a bowl of cornflakes without some bunch or other wanting to promote their own gloomy Aquarian wisdom. By that Monday I was pretty sure Andy Warhol was hidden somewhere directing it all. Script by Feydeau on acid. The ultimate boring formulae, twice as boring as any previous piece of boring cinema.

We realised that we had stumbled on a significant moment in American history: the Age of the Orgasm. The Discovery of
Sex
had occurred a couple of decades earlier, during World War II. Relativity prefigured relativism and here we were. The right to come led our sexual fashions. Helena and I stumbled on a key moment in America's public sexual experiment. In a couple of years the United States had gone culturally from low-contrast black-and-white to vibrant colour. We wished them well but now the buggers, like teenagers, wanted to tell the world what most of it already knew.

The Swarm had never ceased, even in America, but I had been able to ignore it better. We were knackered by the time we got back to Blighty, but were probably happier together than we had ever been. We had never been so thoroughly affectionate about our marriage. Everyone was delighted to see us back and of course we had brought all kinds of stuff for the girls. My mum said they'd all had a wonderful time. The girls had thoroughly enjoyed the visit from their auntie.

Auntie? We were puzzled. I had no brothers or sisters. Helena had one brother and a great-aunt. When we asked more my mum became a bit vague.

Did this auntie have a name?

Funny name, my mum said, beginning to look uncertain. Reeny? Ferny? Something like that. The girls were safe and evidently unharmed. Where had the lady taken them? Helena asked coolly.

‘It was like a really old bit of London,' Sally told us. ‘Like a country village.'

Helena frowned. She was furious with my mother. Mum was normally never short of common sense. How could she allow her own grandchildren to go off with a stranger? Could the girls remember anything else?

It soon became clear to me that Freni Melody had turned up while we were away and somehow persuaded my mother to let her take my children to Alsacia where they had met Molly and some of the other inhabitants of the Sanctuary. Helena decided they had been to somewhere like Lewes or one of the other towns around London that still had the characteristics of an older settlement, but the more I listened, the angrier I got. My mum was close to tears. She kept apologising. ‘I don't know what got into me. It's as if she hypnotised me! How could I let them go off like that? Honestly, I feel I'm losing my head!'

‘Well,' said Helena sharply. ‘I suppose there was no harm done.'

Both Mum and I knew Helena would never again leave the girls in her sole care. Helena thought one of my ‘hippie friends' had been responsible. She had always been mildly unhappy about my taking the children to gigs. Guessing the truth, I was much angrier than she was. Next day, saying I had to see an editor, I took a taxi to Carmelite Inn Chambers.

 

32

ROLLING IN THE RUINS

And so I went back to the Alsacia. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, when the Fleet Street area was pretty much deserted. I half expected the gates to be hidden from me again. But there they were! Slowly, with growing uncertainty, I pushed open the heavy old creaking oak. When the gap was wide enough to admit me I slipped through.

After a moment or two my sense of anticipation left me. I stared in horror at the scene. Perhaps a bomb had hit the Sanctuary. A bomb of modern proportions. Like something from my own childhood. Everywhere I looked buildings were blackened and spoiled. Houses and shops were rubble. The Swan With Two Necks had come under heavy cannon fire, with the whole of its front destroyed. The south wing, where I had lived with Molly, had partially collapsed. Furniture, decorations, a long bar on the ground floor and a good part of the stables were all half-demolished. I clambered through a gap in the wall. This was like the Blitz. The place was evidently looted of all valuables. I stopped. I bent down and picked up a piece of bloodstained silk. What remained of the wall behind me bore a great splash of dried blood. People had died here. People I had known and cared for. One of the women I had loved. Shot, stabbed and dragged away, living or dead, to suffer further indignity, sorrow and pain. Thank God there had been so few children here! Now, again, I understood the wisdom of the Alsacia's inhabitants.

‘Nixer!'

Turning, I saw the abbey was also blackened. Her fine glass was cracked, her vines and bricks sooty. I saw nothing alive. Previously furious with Molly and her mother, I now became terrified for their safety. I ran towards the abbey door. It was locked and barred. Sealed from within. Perhaps the monks refused to open their doors for fear of risking further assault? I beat as hard as I could with the iron knocker on that old timber but nobody answered. The air itself was dead. I heard nothing, not even the scuttling of a rat or the rustle of a pigeon in the guttering. The Swarm, however, had completely gone from my head, as if rewarding me for my return. At that moment I hated the Alsacia. The stink of burnt timber and blackened stonework infected the air. There was no easy way to tell when the Sanctuary had been raided. The ruins could be a year or more old.

‘I shouldn't have left,' I said to myself. I was angry. How could this have happened? Too much loose talk? Too much coming and going? Maybe the Alsacia couldn't sustain the whole thing on the energy it had left? ‘Is everyone dead?' I spoke aloud against the dreadful silence. At that moment I regretted ever coming here, ever meeting Molly and the rest. And my sorrow was still mixed with anger. What horrors might my girls have witnessed if Mrs Melody had brought them here while the place sustained the attack? I picked my way over the ruins. There were no corpses. No body parts. A relief. The door of the abbey was shut. Had Nixer's Roundheads taken everything, including the corpses, away?

The only building left in reasonable condition was the abbey. Fighting had gone on around it, but whoever defended the monks had fought a long, hard battle. Every shrub was trampled down and musket balls had made heavy indentations in the masonry. But still no bodies.

There was nothing else to do. Returning to the abbey, I picked up the big, blackened knocker and hammered with it on the door. I'd break in if I had to! In the silence not even a bird called and the echo of the knocker was very loud.

At that moment I heard someone behind me. I turned, yearning for a pistol.