The Whispering Swarm (51 page)

I was given a place at the centre and on the right of the long table. As soon as we were all standing beside our assigned places the abbot spoke an unfamiliar prayer. Then he told the monks why I was there. He referred to me as Brother Michael, as if I had joined the order as a novice, and explained how I had come to them to help serve the Creator. I was a little surprised. I thought I had agreed to a somewhat hairbrained plan to rescue Charles I from the scaffold! I remembered almost nothing of what I'd said on the previous day. I was indeed tempted to stay. The food was superb, as was the wine. In a previous life our Friar Ambrose had been a first-class chef!

Even now I was so dog-tired I only wanted to sleep again. I asked if I might return to my cell. Drugged by good food, wine and company, I soon fell asleep. I realised I had lost any animosity towards Prince Rupert and Molly. My anger at Helena had already faded. It was too late now to go back on my decision. I had given my word to the prince.

As the days passed, the emotional pain occasionally returned, but someone was always there to keep me company. At one point Ambrose, a cheerful, pleasant-faced monk, a little younger than the others, casually asked if I had ever experienced a miracle. For the first time in my life I couldn't easily tell him I hadn't. I was still profoundly confused. I even felt my identity changing as I behaved in ways I might expect from others but not from myself. I had better control of my feelings. That didn't mean, of course, that I was wholly aware of my own motives or desires. Like many others, I was proud of my self-awareness. But of course because I understood one or two aspects of my interior world did not mean I knew everything there was to know. As the years went by I'd learn how a little self-knowledge could be a very dangerous thing.

 

40

MELANCHOLY BABY

I could at last think of Molly without feeling I was going crazy. I doubted Helena would ever forgive me. I now understood what a shock Mrs Melody's revelations had been to her. I felt numb. I wished her well. I shared my granny's sense of freedom. Wasn't the true test of love a willingness to have the other person do whatever they wished, whenever they wished? But shouldn't that be reciprocal?

I hoped to learn something else from the monks and their wise abbot, but I was still a little wary, not entirely sure of their motives.

There were just eight friars and the abbot. The monastery had been built for sixty or more. Each monk had a distinct personality and corresponding specific duties. Brother Balthazar ran the pharmacy and was their doctor. Brothers Isidore and Erasmus had worked on the magazine and now occupied the library. They devoted as much time to illuminating manuscripts as they had in the past. I spent long periods with them. I had a free run of the place. They had almost as many manuscripts as printed books. Brothers Theodore and Sholto looked after the large kitchen garden which was enclosed by the other buildings on the other side of the chapel and the cloisters. Brothers Aylwyn, Eldred and Ambrose were in charge of food preparation, housework and so on. I joined in their routines, some of which involved prayers in unfamiliar languages. A few were in Latin or Greek, others in Hebrew, though none of them seemed to involve a bible with which I was familiar. In spite of that, whenever I felt like it, I took part in their meetings and found the rhythms and rituals very comforting. Ultimately, however, I could not help becoming just a little bit bored and wanted to get back to the chaos of Ladbroke Grove just to be with the children.

I began to wonder if the Alsacia were some form of giant time machine, capable of visiting relatively few periods. Maybe in some sort of orbit. The orreries might actually navigate the whole thing. There was another mystery. All those people in the Alsacia were now of pretty much the same period. The first time I came, the people had belonged to at least three different centuries. Duval, for instance, was from the seventeenth, Turpin from the eighteenth and Cody from the nineteenth. Now everyone was dressed in seventeenth-century clothes. And there was no sign of Turpin and his contempories, nor of Cody, Carson and the rest. Nobody would tell me anything very revealing. Perhaps the Alsacia was a hub which somehow rotated according to different rules to the rest of the planet, stopping at different bits of London's past. Or maybe they were alternatives to history. My own historical past didn't contain big electric trams being robbed by highwaymen in cocked hats!

Now that my anger had subsided I was worrying about my family, of course. There was plenty of money due in for Helena and the kids. I always made sure of that. And if I died, they'd be well taken care of thanks to my obsessive buying of life insurance because I had seen so many authors' families ruined by premature death and illness. Even if they never found my body, my family would be fine.

Meanwhile, I had resolved, if everything worked out and I survived this adventure, to stop writing pulp fiction. My ambitions were being threatened by my own facility. I invented new formulas for pulp fiction with lazy ease when I could as readily be inventing new ways of looking at the world—or trying to. So I resolved to work out my Jerry Cornelius stories and a planned novel called
Breakfast in the Ruins,
which would mark the end of my pulp career and the beginning of serious ambition. I tried to take advantage of the peace and order at the abbey yet somehow I could only write Meg Midnight stuff! A bit of an irony. I decided I was forcing myself too hard. I should relax for a while and regroup.

I did make an effort, one evening, to drop in at the Swan, to meet my friends and share a shant of ale. Almost at once Prince Rupert stood up from a booth at the back of the saloon bar and waved me over. The crowd had fallen a little quieter. I pushed through it, shook his hand and sat down across from him. Not everyone had heard we had buried the hatchet. I knew there were eyes on us but none openly.

Prince Rupert asked after my health, I after his. He bought a round. I bought another. We discussed the health of various friends and acquaintances. He told a story of meeting Colonel Clitch and Corporal Love near the gates and how they had engaged him, how he had been forced to fight them again, aided in the end by Captain St Claire. I said that they probably hung about there all the time, hoping to catch the odd royalist alone. I told him my own experiences. But St Claire was a mystery. The prince had heard he wrote poetry, that he was hunted by redcoats for some Puritan transgression. He quoted Shakespeare, whom his uncle claimed to have seen in the flesh, performing at the Globe. He narrated a couple of good stories. And soon he was charming me again, though on a deeper level than St Claire. Since we were now allies it wasn't especially difficult for us to bond. Some people naturally strike alliances. Now I wondered: Had he from the start actually conspired with Friar Isidore and Father Grammaticus to hypnotise me? Was I now a character in someone else's fiction? The idea was too weird for me. But I was beginning to get used to weird.

Next, even as Prince Rupert drew me into his plot to rescue King Charles from the scaffold, Molly started writing me letters care of the abbey. She was coming back to the Alsacia. She could not keep away from me. She told me I mustn't believe what anyone else said about her. She would explain it all. We should meet, perhaps at the Swan. I was confused. If this was a cunning plan to embroil me in some complicated amour it was pretty pathetic. Her letters were full of contradiction and revisionism.

I met you on the rebound and you met me on the rebound,
she wrote.
I'd just split up with you-know-who—my ‘cavalier'—and you'd just split up with Helena.

No I hadn't.

You talked me into living with you
 …

No I didn't.

 …
you asked me to marry you
 …

No I hadn't.

I fell in love with you slowly. But deeply. I love you so much. I want you to have the best of me.

I was prepared to let her rewrite her own history. Most of it was sentimental nonsense. I was clinging as tightly as possible to my own reality, my memory. If I didn't I felt I was done for. Memory is the foundation of identity. Through our sense of identity, we act. We determine our moral judgments. We rewrite our own memories, of course, all the time. We create fresh narratives to use in our survival. We agree on fresh histories enabling us to take action. It is part of what makes us such flawed creatures. Creatures of narrative fiction creating cause and effect. In the main I was prepared to go along with my friends' versions of events even when our memories varied enormously. We are protagonists in our own novels.

I told Father Grammaticus about the letters. ‘She must have sent fifty!'

He was a little surprised. ‘I suspect she does loves you,' he said. ‘Or you reflect something in herself that she loves. Why else would she not let you go? Money? You are not especially rich. Power? What else?' He cleared his throat and looked up at me, his eyes sparkling. ‘Have you considered that you were meant to be together?'

‘Not a day passes I do not think that,' I said. ‘But I think the same of Helena. And she's my children's mother…' I could feel the tears returning to my eyes.

‘Our Creator might have chosen to bring you all together, perhaps.' I think he was teasing me a little.

I laughed, but decided to change the subject to something less personal. ‘What part does God play in any of our petty schemes and ambitions? You must have thought about it, Father Abbot.'

‘None,' he replied quickly.

‘He plays
no
part?'

‘For He has given us free will.'

‘And if that free will results in our self-destruction?'

‘So be it.'

‘And so it hardly matters if God does or doesn't exist?'

‘He has given us the means of achieving His plan for us. He will not help us should that plan go wrong after so many attempts. But He is a patient and a loving Creator.'

‘Why should He care if we fail Him, if we fail to realise His plans for us?' I was uncomfortable with the idea of such total authority.

‘I think he cares profoundly how we act. When we pray, He sometimes intervenes to help.'

‘What is God, Father?'

‘God is Nature. And all else is Nature, too. That is why we must strive to know Him,' said Father Grammaticus.

‘But why?'

The abbot lifted his ancient shoulders in a gentle shrug. ‘Perhaps He's lonely?'

 

41

PURITAN CLOTHING

Molly continued to send letters. Several a day for a while. I was tempted to reply, then I was tempted not to read them. I was still very conflicted. Were all her preferred relationships with powerful older men? Had she only become attracted to me because of my power? I was only a few years older, of course, but I had known quite a bit of power for that time. When I first met her I had been a pretty powerful seventeen year old. Had that made me attractive to a girl with a mysterious father? That was when she was breaking up with a father figure. When she came to live with me was it because she had left him and didn't trust herself not to go back? She would have had to live alone. I remember the first time she told me she loved me. I had been so relieved. I could tell her I felt the same. Now, of course, I was pretty certain that she had never loved me much. In another letter she said how she had ‘come to love' me. Which meant she had other motives for being with me initially. What had they been? And I thought
I
was confused!

I love you,
she wrote.
I want to stay with you forever and look after you. Iron your shirts, make your lunch
 …

She'd got the wrong bloke, of course. I really did enjoy equality. I wanted her to fulfill herself, become the painter she could be. I had never felt such deep sadness. I should have known better. I had taken advantage of a girl looking for the unobtainable in an older man. My anger was being replaced with painful melancholy. And a sense that I had betrayed her. I had failed her. All that sadness. Nobody deserves to be lonely.

Not even God.

Next Mrs Melody wrote. I didn't know where they were living. Apparently not in the Alsacia. She explained how Molly was impetuous and had always followed her heart. This seemed a little insensitive to me. She had moved in with Molly because the girl was in a bad way. She added that her daughter had health problems and could probably do with some money for private treatment. She really wanted me back with Molly!

I was tempted. I was so much missing female intimacy. I even considered seeing Lou. That wouldn't have been fair to anyone. I went up to see my mum occasionally, but there was so much that would have worried her it wasn't fair to tell her. Helena continued to be cold whenever I came to see the girls.

I reconciled myself to keeping my journal and spending my evenings at The Swan With Two Necks. I continued to meet Prince Rupert, Duval and the rest, as they plotted to change history. They had heard the Puritan spies asking questions about us all by name. We awaited our four collaborators from France. They had attempted unsuccessfully to recruit Cardinal Mazarin to the royalist cause. He had no wish to openly support a Protestant king. While Mazarin was prepared to give secret help, it was not enough to save the king. We had to do that. He would send us the means of escape.

‘In the event of our success, a Dutch brig captained by Sprye will wait above Blackfriars just off Flete Reach. Mazarin's prepared to give the king temporary shelter in France, as he now gives it to our Queen Henrietta Maria. But he'll not risk war with England. Not yet. He cannot be sure of his own Protestants.'

Then at last the news reached Alsacia from Whitehall: arrogantly the king refused to recognise the legitimacy of the court. He had been disdainful of all chances offered him to be exiled or reduced in rank or even to rule a land where Parliament's powers outweighed his own. He had refused the many attempts to offer clemency and had been sentenced to death for the crime of making war on his own subjects. Tyrannicide, they called it.