The Whispering Swarm

  The highwaymen from the later century—Turpin, Sheppard and the rest—were rarely at the tavern these days. I asked after them and Moll was a little vague.

  ‘Their work takes them far and wide across the country. They continue to support working men from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’

  ‘Riding to York and that, I suppose. Are they all tram chasers?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Come on, Moll. Is there still a moonlit heath where bold tobymen hold up brass-and-steel electric double-decker trams?’ I was growing impatient again, challenging her. I wanted to know how and why this town within the city existed. Did I threaten her? ‘Do Turpin and company still make war on Universal Transport?’

  ‘Some of them,’ she told me evasively. ‘Things change.…’ And, though at first she considered answering, she suddenly, regretfully, refused to tell me any more.

  ‘Turpin has no love for me, Molly, and I little for him, but you must admit it’s surprising. When I first started coming here, the Swan was full of Turpin’s kind. His son, Tom King, Jack Sheppard, Jack Rann, and a whole gang of famous tobymen. Now we see them once in a blue moon.’

  In spite of this goading, she refused to respond. ‘I’m not sure I remember,’ was all she would say.

  Maybe she was genuinely amnesic. Molly was typically extremely frank in her answers. When she was entrusted with a secret, she would simply tell me that she couldn’t speak of it. I never quite got to the truth of what was going on amongst all these heroes of popular folklore. I wouldn’t have been very surprised if Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who dropped in for a beer. Ironically I, who had earned such a large part of my income in what I called ‘the popular-folk-hero business’ was now drinking side by side with their actual manifestations. It was almost as if I’d brought them to life myself; conjured them from thin air. Maybe I was addicted to these inventions now like a smoker to nicotine? There were behavioural addictions just as powerful as others. These ideas brought a frisson of fascination which made my senses suddenly more alive than ever.

  I had such a lot of questions. Many I was reluctant to ask. Could I really make a world? Were all these people just shadows of my childhood imagination? What we called ‘ghosts’? It was too simple an explanation. And too terrifying. I had a lot of myself invested in remaining rational! But I knew in my bones I had not made up Alsacia. Many others had written about it, such as Scott in Sir Nigel. The ancient Sanctuary of the White Friars really had been here since the thirteenth century. Very powerful vows that had been exchanged in order to receive holy protection.

  Not too wild an idea if you accepted the existence of God. But I’d be crazy if I applied it to real life. To believe in a supernatural deity with limitless power and a set of rules for mankind to follow seemed to me like a special kind of sin, a rejection of the power of Man. I was tolerant enough about what others believed. If they thought God was a winged goat, that was up to them. I respected whatever logic or tradition had brought them to that point. But I despised it in myself. Early on I’d learned to curb the kind of imagination others envied or loathed. The fact remained that the abbey and the town had been here, under charter from a pious king, for nearly a thousand years. They believed that God fulfilled His compact. I thought I knew why they evaded my questions. They could not afford to think about it, either. As realities went, this was a pretty strange one. Sadly my own identity depended on my belief in reason, my inability to accept the supernatural, including God.

  The matter of these men and women being creatures of folk tale and myth remained. Some of those very fleshly phantoms were becoming good friends! They weren’t ghosts in any sense I understood. Body heat fairly burst from them as they sang songs and told stories, funny and sad. They had pasts, relatives, ambitions for the future. They believed profoundly in a Creator. These people were far more lifelike than any characters I had created or read about. Surely I could not, in some extraordinary psychotic state, have invented all this—the Alsacia, my friends, our enemies?

  Meanwhile, Helena chose to issue a bit of an ultimatum, one I didn’t find at all unpalatable. She wanted me to come and look after the children so she could go out one once or twice a week. I wanted to see as much of the children as possible and agreed immediately. She told me she did not want me making excuses to stay in the retreat until I was certain I was ‘well’. Or at least had finished my novel.

  In the end I could only take Helena at her word and stop arguing. We had a few unexpectedly pleasant conversations and I remembered how we had fallen in love in the first place. I felt a little guilty when I returned from a call like that but Moll didn’t seem to notice. She appeared determined not to make waves. All that I wanted was someone who loved as loyally as I said I did. Molly and I seemed like that.

  I didn’t use my brain much during those first weeks of spending more days with the girls. I wondered if I could come up with a way of spending time with Molly Midnight and her violet eyes and keeping near to Helena. I didn’t want to stop seeing my children, whom I loved more than anyone. At that point I don’t think Moll liked them coming so close. She was living with me, however, and that gave her an advantage. She began to see things in better perspective. My way.

  Moll grew nervous. She worried, of course, what would happen if Helena demanded I leave ‘the retreat’ and come back to Ladbroke Grove. I wasn’t much help. I was in a daze of sexual exploration and infatuation. I was deeply selfish. Greedy. Guilty. Missing my children. Molly had become everything I had ever desired in a partner. I suspected that her intentions might be short term, but intentions frequently changed. She reflected everything I had ever desired. She was companionable, like a younger sister, passionate as any woman can be, and smarter than I was in many manly conversations concerning the art of warfare and the nature of horses. I loved her humour. Her big smile. If she had changed from the ringleted tomboy I had first met to the cheerful, sexy companion I now knew, then doubtless so had I changed. She said I was completely different. No longer a boy.

  Sometimes, Molly said, I seemed decades older than when we’d first met. I thought I knew what she meant. When I had first seen her she had been the initiator, the leader. Now I frequently led. I thought of us as equals. With equality, so my old Grandma Taylor used to say, comes trust. She’d been a Labour councilor in Clerkenwell. She was talking about societies, but she was a wise old bird and she could just as easily have meant couples. But were we equals?

  ‘With equality comes trust.’ I can see my granny laying out the tea things as she talked. She died when I was eleven. ‘And a trusting society is one which takes it for granted that all their fellow citizens work for the common good. Keir Hardie told me that himself. Which is why those who allow themselves to be corrupted in a democracy are worse than those who merely do what the ruling autocracy tells them to do.’ Granny wasn’t with us long enough. Cancer.

  Molly told me little of her background. She had been born in the Alsacia but her mother was not from there. For a while she had lived abroad in the Middle East before returning with her mother for a bit. When she was twelve she was sent to Godolphin and Latymer in Hammersmith and later went to Oxford, studying classics. ‘I got into Somerville.’ She laughed. ‘Somehow I received a decent degree. But the night I was celebrating, still in Oxford, I met this wonderful-looking man. I called him my long-haired cavalier. He was a bit eccentric, but eccentricity tended to be cultivated at that time at Oxford. I thought he had to be doing a Master’s or was maybe a young don. Perhaps an artist. He could be very mysterious about himself. He wore corduroys and a neckerchief. Sometimes he even had a kind of cloak. Otherwise his clothes were fairly ordinary, yet I called him ‘my cavalier’ because of his hair and beard. It came to a point like yours. You remind me of him now. I thought of him like that from the start. My cavalier! Romantic, I know. But you saw what I was like when I was first here. He’s who brought me back to the Alsacia. And left me here. When he grew bored, I suppose. I had nowhere else to go. Tha
t’s how I fell in with Turpin and the others and took to the steel toby.’

  ‘Your parents…’

  ‘Not sure about my dad. I believe he died when I was young. Mum’s abroad quite a lot of the time with her job. I’m pretty sure she didn’t approve of the relationship. And I had my pride.’

  As Moll grew a little older, she said, she stopped being a tomboy and relied increasingly on what used to be called women’s wiles, almost as if she were exploring that side of her nature or finding out how it was best done. ‘You met the men I fell in with. Rogues and adventurers. Some girls went after musicians. There weren’t many in the Alsacia, so I fell for highwaymen. I was romantic. They offered all kinds of attractive dangers.’ I had known other women like Moll, who plunged into experience determined to know the lure, as it were, of the lash. In the ’70s they began to call it ‘empowerment’. In Ladbroke Grove, the rock-and-roll world, many girls scarcely survived the adventure. There are a lot of addictions. Few of them wind up making you feel better about yourself.

  Then, without any warning I had seen, Helena decided I’d been in exile long enough and announced she wanted me to leave my retreat and come home to Ladbroke Grove. We had to think of the children. She expected to have a serious talk about things. And there I was, unable to tell fact from fiction, living pretty literally in a fantasy world.

  I had to think seriously about what we were doing. I had enjoyed my break from responsibility, but I couldn’t ignore it much longer. I must start making serious choices.

  24

  SOMETHING LIKE REMORSE

  ‘I think you really are altruistic,’ Moll told me one night as we lay exhausted in our big soft bed.

  I, of course, felt even guiltier than before. I was already planning to return to my ‘real’ world. But I was flattered. Thinking about it later I’m not sure she meant to be flattering. She might have meant I was naïve or gullible. Did she mean I really loved them both? For a while, the convenience of two wives, regular contact with the girls and plenty of time to write tended to overshadow other considerations. I think they both realised after a while how well the arrangement suited me. But for a while, of course, it had also suited them. Now both women were growing impatient with the situation while I used it to turn out one book after another, putting off the moment when I would have to make a choice. Moll was ultimately the worst off out of our particular threesome. My guilt shifted its focus from Helena to her.

  ‘You love us both, don’t you?’ Moll said sweetly one evening over supper in our Alsacia rooms. I think she was genuinely trying to empathise with me, to put herself in my shoes. As unexpected tears came into my eyes, she reached a hand to hold mine.

  Molly wasn’t weak. She only liked to play at being pliable. Even convincing herself sometimes that she was helpless. Passive-aggressive? She was certainly argumentative. I felt a certain jealousy, too. No matter how much I asked, she would never tell me who her ‘cavalier’ was, though I was pretty sure he lived in the Alsacia. She found my moments of jealousy ludicrous, and I was forced to admit some of my attitudes were hard to maintain in the Sanctuary. The place had no evident reason to be where it was, almost ‘outside time’. In moments of depression Molly thought the Sanctuary had a way of taking your years so that you woke up one morning and found yourself too old to pursue any of your ambitions. So when I talked of leaving the Alsacia, she thought she might come with me. I think now she believed it was the right thing to do, a sign of maturity. But I really didn’t want my ‘fantasy’ life in the Alsacia and my ‘real’ life beyond ever to meet. We began to have arguments in which she accused me of being ashamed of her. What had actually happened was that I grew increasingly suspicious of her histrionics. The arguments worsened. She knew very well that I wasn’t ashamed of her and that I merely wanted to keep my two lives separate. I told her that if I left Alsacia I would, for the moment, have to go alone. It made sense. To take Moll with me would simply complicate matters.

  One night, after a frustratingly circular argument, I did just what I’d threatened. Taking almost nothing with me, leaving a note that offered little but reassurance, I walked to the gates and stepped through them, not certain what would happen when I did so. On one level I knew what I did was cowardly.

  I had no intention of leaving for long but somehow the days passed more rapidly in Ladbroke Grove than I expected. I had expected a cool reception from Helena. Instead, she was glad to see me. She said I was more relaxed, more my old self. The retreat had done me good. Maybe I should make a regular thing of it? I was calmer, more mature. To me she seemed warmer, less critical. The agitated nervousness which almost always plagued her had subsided. Our lovemaking was wonderful. We both agreed we were falling in love all over again.

  So much for altruism, I thought. I really was falling in love with Helena and she with me. I hadn’t told her about Moll. Moll, it’s true, never left my thoughts. I frequently felt ashamed of myself. But I couldn’t get over the simple pleasure of ordinary life, taking the girls out to the park, writing at my familiar desk, going shopping in Portobello market, the pictures at the International Film Theatre, meals at the Windmill. All so happily, comfortingly, normal. The Alsacia became something of a dream again. A country I knew and loved but had no urge to visit. At least for a while.

  The raven, Sam, returned one afternoon in early September, soon after the kids finished their summer holidays from St James’s Norland, a local Church of England school with a good reputation. Most of the children there either went to the Fox school or on to Holland Park Comprehensive. Ours wanted to go to Holland Park which at that time was considered a good school to get into and a flagship of the comprehensive system. Sally and Kitty had made huge strides in their primary school. We were all upstairs in the big office-cum-living room at Ladbroke Grove. Helena’s louche friend Marge was telling Sally and Kitty how much she and other girls from Godolphin and Latymer had envied Holland Park where they were rumoured to use drugs, drink and enjoy sex as much as they liked. Helena and I were desperately trying to divert Marge but she was hard to stop at full throttle.

  As the girls told a story of one of their friends’ older brothers who had been drunk in class, I recognised a pair of sparkling black eyes glaring through the big bay windows of my office, staring at me with an expression of weary discontent. They belonged to that sarcastic raven who made me feel so uneasy. Clearly he was hoping to be let in. When the girls had skipped back out to the gardens followed by Marge and Helena I went and slid open the sash window. ‘So what’s up?’ I asked, a little brusquely.

  He strutted in and stood on my little Olympia electric, his claws rustling on the sheet of paper I had recently wound in. ‘Altruism?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you start,’ I said. ‘I’m doing my best.’ I felt wretched. I hadn’t heard a word from Moll since I left. I had been relieved at first but now I was worrying a little. Had he brought a message, perhaps? By the way he cast his eye about I suspected he was looking for food. ‘I was under the impression that we had an agreement’, he said, scoping our cat Tom who had just strolled up and was looking at him with mild curiosity. For Tom any animal who managed to make it into our apartment was by definition a guest, one of us, and so should be treated with politeness and generosity. That was Tom’s point of view, anyway. Had he been able, Tom would have offered Sam a cup of tea and a plate of seedcake. Sam wasn’t our first visitor to be accepted by him. There had been mice, a young rat, several blackbirds and wrens, not to mention an Old English sheepdog, which had been neurotic before it arrived and had lasted a week or two before we were forced to return him to his breeder. Sam nodded at Tom who left as soon as it became clear there was no food. ‘My hope was that you would take my advice for a bit. I imagined that you understood how useful I could be to you in guiding you between the worlds.…’

  ‘Not my understanding, Sam.’ I resented this intrusion and his general presumption about our relationship. ‘I still plan to see Molly. I haven’t abandoned her
! I go back and forth between here and the Alsacia pretty much as I please. I have friends there, just as I have here. But my children have to come first.’

  ‘It’s the Chevalier. He begs for your company. For dinner.’ Sometimes I forgot how Sam seemed able to read my mind. ‘And that of your sweet lady Molly, of course. He was asking after you both. He suggests Friday or Saturday.’

  ‘It’ll have to be Friday,’ I said. ‘I promised to take the kids out on Saturday night.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Sam, by way of understanding. ‘Good luck with the deadline.’ He walked back through the window, hopped up onto the back of the sofa by the open window and then flew east on his strong wings. Was that him cawing into the early autumn air? Announcing his credentials to his fellows? Or mocking them?

  When later I asked Moll if she was familiar with Sam, she gave an evasive answer. She seemed happy to see me. She didn’t ask me to stay the night.

  I had still not told Helena about Molly. Did it matter so long as Helena believed the ‘retreat’ had made me a better person? There seemed no point. Especially if I was a better person. Everybody won. I planned to make trips to the Sanctuary on a fairly regular basis. And if Molly wasn’t prepared to accept the arrangement I proposed, so much for that. I would still go. I had even wondered about taking my kids there. The girls expressed cautious agreement but Helena wouldn’t let me, even though she didn’t believe the place existed. She knew my ‘retreat’ had to be fairly close. She had ruled out Kings Hall and decided I had been staying at the Mill, a posh reconstructed windmill only a few miles away, in Tufnell Hill where our drummer Tubby Ollis lived permanently. I could cycle the distance easily. Helena identified it with a delusion I controlled most of the time. She had decided I visited some posh loony bin like the Priory but preferred to call the mysterious place a ‘writer’s retreat’. That’s what she told the neighbours. Knowing I could always find relief at Alsacia from the Whispering Swarm made it considerably easier to bear. Easier to work, too. I could anticipate visiting the Sanctuary, rest from the Swarm and, feeling restored, return to work. I could even go back briefly, as an experiment. Sam’s invitation came at a great time!