Though this was not the first talking bird I had encountered, I was still surprised. ‘I’ve never met a talking crow before,’ I said.
‘No and you’re not likely to,’ said the bird with astonishing elocution. ‘I’m a raven. I was sent from the Alsacia because no other messages got through to you. Apparently everyone’s been calling you. They even sent the green Lagonda but the people said you had moved or that you were not who you distinctly are. You might have several enemies hereabouts. This is nice, isn’t it? Like being in the country.’
Once again I suspected LSD, increasingly popular in the area. And I had just lit a joint. I frowned.
‘Now the neighbours will hear me talking to myself and will be sure I’m barmy,’ I said.
‘They’ll think they’re barmy when they hear me talking to you,’ said the raven. ‘Shall I caw?’
‘If you like.’
‘Sure.’ He lifted his head, opened his beak, drew breath and let out an incredibly loud cry which echoed around the square. His next words were a whisper in comparison. ‘OK. So shall I hang around like an omen, perched on your backside as you pray for release? Or will you waddle back indoors and see who can get to that open upstairs window first? I’m here to say Moll Midnight asked after you and sent her best. She says to drop in any time. More importantly, Friar Isidore would like to see you urgently at a place of your own choosing.’
Surely this was too much of a delay to be another late acid reaction. If anything, this was a good old-fashioned psychotic episode. I’d read about those, too. Could I be experiencing serious psychosis? I didn’t believe it. There had been no warning sign. Pulling myself together I remembered when this had happened before. I had met a talking jackdaw when I was a kid climbing on piles of weed-grown rubble. He had hopped on my shoulder and we’d exchanged a few words before he no doubt flew off home. It had nonetheless been a magical experience. ‘Why would Friar Isidore send a talking bird? A raven at that. Aren’t you a harbinger of something?’
‘Doom? I think that’s because the word “doom” is tellingly croaked. You’ve seen me around. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. But I’m not a spy. I’m not a soddin’ harbinger, either. I’m just a regular messenger. I work part-time at the Tower. Well, not your Tower. The old Elizabethan Tower. I had an idea for a story, incidentally.…’ And the raven began to do the thing an author most fears: he outlined the plot of his novel to me. I had to stand there, smoking a Sullivan and listening to what seemed a pretty banal story about a bunch of birds who enjoyed tricking people into thinking they were schizophrenic. ‘Believe me, I had this idea long before Hitchcock!’
‘Short on irony,’ I said when he had finished. ‘Try it in the States.’
‘Oh what a witty man the boy’s become. I remember you blushing away in the stables. Seems like yesterday. You didn’t even notice me. Anyway, they’d like to see you for old time’s sake at the Carmelite Inn entrance. That’s all I was told. And I’ll be looking out for your next book. If it’s anything like mine, I’ll sue.’ With this empty threat he hopped ostentatiously to the flower bed and waddled across the lawn to admire himself in the reflecting window glass.
‘You’re probably an illusion,’ I said, ‘so why should I listen to you?’
He paused in his grooming. ‘Why shouldn’t you? You’re short of tin, aren’t you?’
‘I’ll be fine when I finish the story I’m working on upstairs. I’m not exactly looking for fairy gold. Any particular hour of the day?’
‘If you’ve just started the story, make it this time next week. If you’re still usually writing them in three days, that will let you recover.’
‘It’s the only economic way to justify doing this one,’ I said, ‘since Fleetway gets the royalties. But with a few names changed and giving horses a few extra legs I’ll probably sell them as sword and sorcery novels in the States.’
‘So you’re still doing those awful historical fantasy things?’
I was sensitive about my hackwork. I turned my back on the raven. I went inside and upstairs to my typewriter where I was, of course, working on the first of another series of Meg stories: Black Sword of the Dales. The window was open. He must have peeked.
I looked for bird shit on the carpet.
16
SUCCUMBING
It came on me the way an affair can happen, suddenly, when everything at home is fine, knocking along okay, and then, there you are in some sleazy Bloomsbury bedsitter, doing what comes naturally and with such unwelcome complications.…
A day later the book was done and I went to Fleet Street to give it to Bill Baker. Helena, remembering what happened the last time I delivered a script in person, told me not to wake the children when I stumbled home. I thought it wise to skip lunch with Bill. His lunches were likely to last into the small hours of the next day and never leave licenced premises. So I tried to hand in the manuscript at the ground-floor reception desk. But the uniformed old jobsworth on duty insisted I deliver it myself. On entering the lift I recognised Les Brown, a former colleague from my editorial days, who suggested we go to get a few pints for old time’s sake. I made an excuse, reached my floor, threw the envelope on Bill Baker’s desk then legged it to the annex and the back lift generally used by directors.
In Farringdon Road I found myself without thinking heading for the Old Bailey and was soon in the familiar grey backstreets which took me to the great Courts themselves and Metropolitan, our Tarzan typesetters. I walked down the steep steps into the clacking office and the crowded proofing room, full of the same men in waistcoats and felt hats who had always seemed to be there, and asked someone I half recognised if he’d seen Friar Isidore. ‘Does he still come in?’
‘Yeah,’ said the sallow old hack not looking up from his galleys. ‘Usually on a Wednesday.’
‘Know much about him?’
An expression of disgust. ‘Well, he’s a bloody monk, ain’t he? Not that much to know about a monk, is there? Why?’ He became alert. ‘Done anything he shouldn’t?’
I grew automatically wary. ‘You’ve not heard anything? About LSD?’
‘Why, is he a millionaire?’ That was gullible old Fleet Street for you. Nobody more behind the times. Nobody wanting to believe a sensational lie more than the journalist it’s being told to. Sniffing the same old trails. Some of them honestly believed they printed the truth.
‘I mean drugs,’ I said. Did he make a habit of slipping Mickey Finns, say, into young editors’ cups of Darjeeling? In the semidarkness the few men standing about waiting to receive their ‘pulls’ pricked up their evil little ears.
I looked around, rather regretting what I’d said, and then it dawned on me why I’d rushed to get the manuscript in today: so I could be paid by the Thursday after next. It was paysheet day at Fleetway. Leave it any later and you didn’t get paid for two weeks. We used to think that was slow. Wednesday? Proofing day for Tarzan and …
I turned.
‘I had just left! Some instinct brought me back.’ Friar Isidore stood in the doorway. He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps I forgot these galleys!’ In white cassock, taller than anyone except me, his eyes mild and twinkling and his long fingers tightly twined before him, the friar regarded me from above rimless glasses. He seemed genuinely happy. He was radiant. ‘Oh! How delightful! Wait a few minutes and I’ll be there. I wasn’t expecting you until next week.’ He ran up to the desk to receive his forgotten envelope. He waved it. ‘Doubly blessed, eh?’
So I stepped outside with him and we went down to Ludgate Hill to that same clattering, chattering, giggling ABC Teashop where I was careful to watch that he put nothing in my cup. It was not so much for himself, he said, as for Father Abbot who asked almost every day about me. Had he made me nervous, showing me too much, too soon? He had tried to give me what was needed to persuade the prince to throw in with us. ‘At present he is adrift, dragged along one brane and then another by time’s awful gravity.…’
‘So he sent a talking rave
n rather than a billet-doux,’ I said.
Brother Isidore seemed to be humouring me rather than I him. Perhaps the LSD had permanently affected both of us? I let it drop. I don’t think he had any idea what I was talking about. I smiled to myself. Suddenly this wasn’t a very sinister rabbit hole at all.
‘What’s wrong with the abbot?’ I surprised myself. I felt genuine concern.
‘He had set great store by you. Will you come to see him?’
I was wary. ‘Not for tea. Or coffee. Or lemonade.’
He frowned, puzzled. ‘No refreshment of any kind shall be offered if that suits you,’ he said.
I loved his gentle innocence. If it was assumed then I was completely fooled. And if he had anything but the best of intentions, at least in his scheme of things, he did not betray by the slightest expression or tic that he was lying.
‘And how is Father Grammaticus?’ Was the abbot manipulating this sweet-natured man?
‘Well. As ever, well! He has a great spirit and enjoys robust health.’
I thought I had last seen a rather frail, delicate old man. Apparently he had been ill when I saw him first.
Friar Isidore led me back through that rich, strong-smelling rat’s nest of lanes, alleys, courts and twittens, more intricate than a North African souk, to Carmelite Inn Chambers, until we again pushed open the thick iron-bound doors of the Alsacia. No illusion there! So parts of my delusion were true! Before we ever reached Alsacia’s massive doors I had walked under old stoneworks which might once have been gatehouses, like parts of abandoned baileys around which buildings of all uses and eras had grown.
And there was The Swan With Two Necks, quiet at this time of day, an enormous, rambling, ramshackle building linked to other ramshackle buildings, leaning hard against each other to form the inner yard. And in front of that another cobbled square. I looked for the tavern’s inhabitants. I thought for a second I saw the potman, Joey Cornwall, rolling a big barrel through the doors. A few others stood at rest, chatting, leaning on brooms, setting down pails. An ordinary lazy Wednesday afternoon in a quiet, domestic bit of London. Their costumes were rather drab, their long hair dirty. They did not look especially old-fashioned. I saw no beautiful girl in highwayman costume. No sign of anything at all romantic. Only the sweet scent of horse manure told me the stables were still in use. I laughed to myself, shaking my head as we rounded a corner and passed under an archway opening out into a forecourt planted with shrubs. We entered the old abbey, now smelling of rich summer flowers, mould and dust, dust which curled and fluttered in the afternoon light; and there in those mellow cloisters I again came face-to-face with the patrician Father Grammaticus.
I shook the abbot’s hand. His huge purple veins ran like maps of mountain ranges under the thin, white skin of his wrist. His age and vulnerability were almost repulsive. How could Friar Isidore believe he was in better health? Smiling, the abbot took my young hand in both his frail ones. ‘I am gladdened you came at last, my boy. There is a growing urgency. You are so badly needed here. He will only trust one who resembles the silhouette whom he insists on calling Mercury. Fate alone has given you that role, even though you are now bearded. You are Mercury. I can see the resemblance to his poor brother.’ He led me from the cloisters back through the low doorway into the little chapel itself.
His grip was far too strong.
I felt suddenly sick with anxiety. I worried how to retreat. I told him about my happy marriage and how much I loved my children, how I devoted so much of my spare time to them, how I loved to get up, cook them breakfast, take them to school on my bike—one on the handlebars, one on the saddle, while I pedaled between them—and how proud I was of them. I told him that this was not something I was prepared to jeopardise. I checked my watch. ‘They’re expecting me home for tea.’
He nodded. ‘We thought you would visit us a week from today. The raven is one of our most reliable couriers.’
‘My fault,’ I said. ‘I came in early. Needed the money.’
He released me, then reached out to touch my lips and I was suddenly, awkwardly silent. I said I was sorry. I got up to leave. Too much time had passed. The gorgeous light fell in shafts through the stained glass, fell on the altar where in the cool, rippling air suddenly a writhing living fish stood on its fluttering tail, as if straining to break out of its natural habitat, its body running with brilliant greens and blues and a dozen different shades of gold and red.
‘Ah—!’ He sensed something I did not and reached for the goblet.
And then it was gone, popping out of existence and the light with it. ‘Radiant Time … Brother Armand’s greatest discovery. Revealed to the prince. And now the dreadful Spaniard. The Inquisition. Radiant Time. And Cromwell. I wonder. Is he as savage, as cruel as they say? Their hatred of us is palpable. Yet we hold many of the same principles. Tom Paine was here. We sheltered him for weeks. Or will … Radiant Time. He said we practised what they only preached. Every branch in harmony. It can be achieved, I know.’ He seemed to be finishing a sentence, not beginning one. ‘That is why it is so important you be here when the prince is also present.’
He bent to his left, to an ecclesiastical cupboard on the nearby table. The cupboard was of thick, simply hewn oak with long strap hinges of blackened iron. He put in a dull brass key and opened it. I blinked. The indigo light shivered from the box, changing to ghastly yellow then blue-green fluttering like living storm-shredded rags. How had he conjured it from one place to another? The fish stood upright again, flicking its tail, straining for the surface, changing colour as if to escape recognition when it tried to flee. I looked towards Father Grammaticus and Friar Isidore but the light was too white and bright for my eyes. I couldn’t see their expressions. ‘Which prince do you mean?’ I asked. I was growing uncomfortable.
I heard a great swelling noise that was discordant yet sublimely beautiful while distantly the abbot spoke of God’s vast universe, worlds without end, and the significance of humanity, ‘perhaps the only sentient creatures of our kind in the whole of material Creation! Can you believe that? We are creatures blessed with souls and advanced intellect! God’s image. With material bodies. Alone to give God the praise He deserves for His wisdom and His Grace. Did God create the universe or did the universe make God? That was the only question in the end. In the name of the Creator and the created, created and Creator. Evolved man or God? Shall we ever know or cease to care which began the cycle? We live in a world of duality and paradox.’
These didn’t sound very likely words for a Christian clergyman. So this, in spite of all the Christian trappings, actually was a cult.
I got up slowly. ‘I must go. I’m sorry.’
‘You will come back. We do not lie. We cannot swear, but we do not lie. The divine—the divine—’ He bowed and led me to the door. He was babbling, a madman. ‘Those simpleminded Puritans want our Treasure. They will do anything they can to steal it. They think they can use it. They fear us. They fear the power of the old religions. Yet we pray for them, also. We cannot fight if we are not free. We would not harm them. Free will is at the heart of our—’ Echoes, as if in a great, empty house. ‘We believe. Light is substance. Light is gravity and time. Next week. Same sun’s ray—same moonbeam—same hour … the moment will be made. Each moment ordered in a state of linearity. It can be done.’ That, when I wrote it down later, was the best I recalled.
‘Of course.’ I pretended to agree. I was holding down my panic. Maybe this was an asylum as I’d first thought, and the loonies really had taken over the bin? Or maybe we were experiencing some sort of social experiment? I chose to take what he said as a question. With Friar Isidore beside me and the blue-green flames still fluttering before my eyes, I said goodbye to the abbot, left the abbey and Alsacia, waved farewell to Father Grammaticus and caught a 15 bus all the way home. I felt guilty.
I was home much earlier than Helena had expected. She was pleased, full of curiosity. ‘You’ve got a telegram from New York,’ she sa
id. ‘Your agent. I’ll make some tea.’
17
THE TEMPTATIONS
The telegram was from my agent, Bob Cornfield, in America. I was invited to attend a big SF convention in New York and Doubleday, who were enthusiastic about the ‘historical fantasies’ I was publishing with them, had offered to pay my fare while ‘an anonymous donor’ would pay my expenses. I had a good idea who my benefactor was. Doubleday were now her publisher and she had recommended Allard, Fisch, Bayley and me, among others. Judy Merril saw me as an ally in her one-woman crusade to improve the quality and critical reception of science fiction. After the Labor Day convention another conference would be held and Rex had been invited, too. Most Americans had not seen New Worlds and very few had any idea of what we were really about. Helena thought I should go. I was reluctant to make the journey without her. She deserved the break more than me. She laughed. My being away would be a break for her, not to worry. Get her a nice dress at Saks Fifth Avenue, something for the kids at FAO Schwarz.
Aboard a cheap flight via Dublin, I arrived in New York with a babbling, crazed Rex Fisch in August 1967. Rex was going home on some personal matter but would meet up at the writers’ conference in Milford, Pennsylvania, a relatively short ride from New York. The Vietnam War was the big issue of the day and the Aer Lingus jet was packed with priests and nuns divided on the rights and wrongs of the conflict. While the Catholic-born Rex sat purse lipped beside me a bunch of Irish priests argued furiously up and down the aisle of the 727. We arrived a lot more tired than when we had left and New York was almost overwhelming, but Doubleday had booked me into the Park Plaza, looking over Central Park, and I began to feel a touch of euphoria. There were twin beds. I offered Rex the other and was glad that he only stayed in New York a couple of days. The big convention was coming up. In those days the smells of coffee and strong tobacco made up the distinctive scent of the city. Brilliant neon reminded me of the wonder of my childhood after the war when streets had come alive again. And Central Park was beautiful. Early russet among the green. I was entranced!