The Whispering Swarm

  ‘What are they really afraid of, Moll?’ I spoke almost without thinking.

  ‘As I said, it’s mortality.’ Sometimes she sounded like a bored teacher to a child. She treated me the same in bed when she thought I was naïve and too prudish to play some violent game which I’d previously tried and disliked. Sometimes I felt so much older! My experience of most ongoing threesomes, for instance, was that ultimately they created emotional confusion for someone. Too many conflicting agendas. Some games also involved a loss of privacy, of self. She didn’t believe that I hadn’t particularly liked them. In the right circumstances I could play as cruelly as the next man but I was virtually incapable of objectifying a sexual partner. I had friends with open marriages and could see they managed their lives well enough. When I tried it, I became confused, emotionally and psychologically.

  Amused by what she thought of as my prudery Moll loved me enough to accept how I felt. I in turn loved her for what I thought of as her courage and curiosity. The power of the imagination could create a positive monogamy. But I knew it couldn’t really last.

  22

  MY GAMES

  I told Molly I hated games. But really both of us played a game. We didn’t know the rules and we didn’t know what there was to win or lose. To a greater degree than I realised at first, our roles were changing. They weren’t especially healthy. Against everything I had ever felt like doing I now encouraged other fantasies. Ah, the taste of them. Power and submission. It dawned on me that she had no boundaries. I, like many, had determined my own. Autodidacts like me worked out some rules for ourselves, a moral position. She had no rules except what she borrowed from me, what she interpreted as my desires. She now possessed a not-unattractive ambiguous quality. Was she auditioning roles? Had she turned herself into a quasi-child whom I could fuck whenever I felt like? What was happening? I didn’t like women who liked that crap! All it did was feed a hunger, something which must be exorcised or satisfied and accommodated. It felt vaguely nasty. We hovered on the edge of a terrible temptation which I knew in my bones would become an addiction to poison my life and very probably hers, too. She wanted the experience again. The sweet, fantastic, all-consuming sensations she had shared with her first important lover, whom she called her ‘cavalier’. I was jealous of him. I saw him as a rival. I was competing with him, following not my own desires but his. Her mentor? I asked. Did he live in the Alsacia? Sometimes, she said. I was pretty sure at that point it was Turpin, which was why he was off hunting double-deckers on the Cambridge Express run. I had hardly seen him or any of his compatriots since I arrived. The ‘cowboys’ had all disappeared. They had met in Oxford. I couldn’t imagine Buck Jones in The High. Or could her old lover be Duval? D’Artagnan? One of the other musketeers? All were great horsemen, of course, and as such could be called ‘cavaliers’.

  I refused to admit to myself that Molly so thoroughly engaged my emotions. I think she believed it was possible to compartmentalise her life because she had seen men do it. But not all men do it, and it’s usually harder still for women. It drives them crazy. They’re not trained to kill feeling. Moll wanted to enhance it. I could never really see it like that. Slow, romantic foreplay was what I liked, no matter what we followed it with. I favoured a romantic calling, and harnessing my nature was what I was about. Between my craft, my magazine and my rock band, I could have my pick of what most young men would consider unobtainable. I was constantly offered what old perverts craved and could only find by paying whores. We hadn’t become avant-garde only in terms of the arts. We changed the norm for lovemaking. We were in the vanguard of the sexual revolution, in those brief decades from sexual liberation to the New Puritans, to HIV and AIDS. I would come to understand how she was addicted to fantasy and the indirect uses of power and how that addiction would become the main problem in our relationship, threatening break-up. But that day was still far away. I believed I was helping her feel more secure and that if she was secure she would not need fantasy to bring pleasure. Yet, when I could and because I loved her, I did my best to play the games she wanted. The days rolled by, passion still unspent.

  Perhaps because I was so relieved not to suffer the Swarm, I did not recognise the signs of a weird kind of depression. A depression which still haunts me. I did not want to admit that I was missing the children and Helena. No matter where I am, that strange, overheated period of my life sometimes returns to mystify me.

  There was Moll, as beautiful as always, as attached to me as ever. My angel. My muse. My damnation. She occasionally sensed my sudden moments of terror. There were periods when I got a flash forward to the future, times when I dreamed a scene accurately and in detail, something she would actually be doing, perhaps, and hadn’t told me about. I had done that since childhood. Women thought me psychic. I didn’t know what it meant. My mother could consistently pick winners. Auntie Ethel had taught me to read the tarot with an accuracy which scared me. I hated that accuracy. But Father Grammaticus also spoke admiringly of ‘psychic’ talents I remained sceptical about. More than once he talked about Radiant Time. What was that? Part of the rational answer I yearned for?

  ‘Why are they afraid of the outside world?’ I repeated the question to her more than once. Her answers were never entirely satisfying. She was often amused.

  ‘They fear they will die of plague or be attacked. Or eaten by cannibals,’ she told me one day. ‘They have so many stories of the World Beyond, as some call it. Your London will swallow them up or turn them mad or the law will have them and cart them off to jail or transport them as indentured servants, even slaves. The Sanctuary has been under attack almost constantly since the war between Parliament and the king. They have seen Cromwell’s Roundheads make a little headway. Though they’ve made the place their headquarters, don’t expect the Cavaliers to be here at all times. They trust neither king nor Protector. They fear the monks have been compromised in their compact with God. You’ve witnessed one attack by Nixer and his militia and seen how easily we beat them back. But Cromwell’s power increases. I think we are now truly under threat. Should that great threat come, we have a fighting chance. A good one. The Alsacians will defend this place to the last man or woman.’

  ‘And child?’ I asked. She had already evaded my questions about why we saw so few small children here.

  ‘It’s a tradition with them to defend the Sanctuary, as it is to go armed. This place is, after all, a rogues’ rookery.’ She laughed. ‘And you must defend what’s your own. But really they fear those who hate them and would see them trampled into nothing, remembered by no one.’ I noticed that she again evaded a question but I lacked the will to challenge her.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure the local council would go that far,’ I joked, but Molly, who usually made light of things, was almost grave. She was no longer self-mocking. Her seriousness took me aback.

  ‘We are freeborn English people and will stay so,’ she insisted. ‘There are those who would do us grave harm from within and from without. Corporal Love and Colonel Clitch and Jake Nixer, too. The first two are little better than mercenaries, though dangerous enough. We truly fear the likes of Nixer, who sincerely wish us scoured from the face of the Earth. You’ve met the Intelligencer General? Cromwell’s former London intelligencer Jacob Nixer? Once he was little more than a spy—now he is, after Cromwell himself, the most powerful man in the city. The two offices are the same. The Lord Protector acts under pressure from his own Puritans. Jake Nixer has full power to arrest and interrogate whomever he pleases. This man is charged to detect all crime, all wantonness, all witchery, all evil and devilry and pagan worship, all servants of Lucifer and his horrid angels including any others, mortal or supernatural, who threaten the Realm.’ Her smile was humourless. ‘He is perhaps our greatest single enemy, Jake Nixer, with Old Thunder and his growing band of cruel cronies. Privately, and do not ask how I know, Nixer fears he dreams and cannot wake up. I suspect he believes the Sanctuary to be sentient. Satan personified or the Colch
ian Dragon protecting our Treasure. He is possessed. Our Treasure will release him, he says, from his dream. Odd fellow, eh?’

  ‘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!