The Whispering Swarm

  Reluctantly deciding that the old man was at least partly senile, I tried again: ‘But why were they all taken away and their houses left to fall into ruin?’ I asked.

  ‘An anomaly, I suppose. But they are safe enough, I’m sure. Not every brane is under our control.’

  I turned to Friar Isidore. ‘Do you know who or what set the houses on fire?’

  He replied promptly. ‘Our enemies! Of course! I thought we explained! Those who would steal our Treasure. But God again provided a miracle.’

  I was incredulous. ‘But I saw the ruins. The blood. People died out there. Some were my good friends. I loved one of them.’ I stopped.

  Seeing my distress, the abbot grew serious. ‘Heaven protects its own. That is a constant.’

  ‘A constant? What’s a constant, exactly?’

  Father Grammaticus frowned. ‘We must get some more teacakes. I see you are enjoying them.’

  I had been eating almost compulsively as I often did when I was nervous. I could eat a dozen doughnuts just waiting to board a plane. I began to apologise, but now both monks were smiling.

  ‘We have plenty of teacakes,’ said Father Grammaticus.

  And then I wondered if perhaps they had slipped something into the buns. Weren’t we reprising Alice? It reminded me of a mad hatter’s tea party we’d done for school one time. I was certainly having trouble understanding the conversation.

  ‘Where did they go? Out into Cromwell’s London?’ I grew increasingly baffled. I imagined a wheel with certain defined stops, each a different alternative to our own world.

  Father Grammaticus sighed and lowered his eyes. I could tell the monks would not be any more forthcoming.

  ‘Perhaps we could continue this conversation later?’ Reluctantly, I began to rise. I needed to return to Helena and the girls. They would be concerned and I was vaguely worried for them.

  ‘That would be delightful.’ The abbot got up slowly. Brother Isidore was already on his feet. ‘You have a fine, enquiring mind, young man. I am so glad you are here to help us with God’s work.’

  I wondered if I should remind him I didn’t believe in God and ask exactly how I was helping, but I wanted to get out of there. They wouldn’t tell me where Moll was, so I would find her for myself. Meanwhile I needed to reassure myself that my children and my wife were all right.

  Brother Isidore took me to the abbey’s outer entrance. ‘It was a great pleasure to see you. And you have made the abbot so happy.’ He opened the door.

  I walked out into a cold winter’s evening. The acrid stink of burnt wood and stone had disappeared, replaced with a smell of sweet smoke against the clean, frosty snap of the air. Every building was as fresh as my first sight of it. A horse and cart went by in the crowded street. I caught the stink of the open sewers. I heard human voices, a cock crowing, dogs barking. I looked back to ask the friar what on earth had happened but he had already closed the door.

  The whole of Alsacia was exactly as I remembered it! People strolled the narrow bustling streets. Huxters argued. Lovers met and parted. They bought and they sold. They gossiped and laughed. The air was rich with the scent of life. I could smell food cooking. The Swan With Two Necks spilled over with customers, and her stables were busy with ostlers tending the usual horses. A muted babble came from her bars. I knew now what it meant to feel your head swim. Which had been the illusion? Could it be both?

  I needed a drink. I headed for the Swan.

  The warmth of the Sanctuary immediately embraced and comforted me. Those familiar smells and noises were like a drug. The day was as cold here as it was outside, but the temperature was somehow different. I inhaled the farmyard smells of a London where people still rode horses and raised animals for meat, milk or fur. I heard the clop of horseshoes striking cobblestones, the clucking of chickens, the hissing of geese. Voices were raised in cheerful conversation. Someone shouted an insult from a top floor window. The clatter of looms. A chiming clock. The clanging of cookware. Honking donkeys, bleating goats. The evidence of all those animals was left on the same cobblestones. Not all crap was good for the garden!

  I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I should go to the Swan. If my friends weren’t there I should feel compelled to look for them. And where would that be? I collected myself and made my decision. I needed the inn, the very opposite of the abbey’s austerity. Surely, any answers I found there would be more direct. There, too, I’d find some cheerful company, perhaps even some sort of explanation. I decided to follow my impulses and hope my friends could lead me to a deeper understanding of the part of London time forgot. I wanted the warmth and friendship of The Swan With Two Necks. I opened the doors of the saloon bar and, my spirits improving in anticipation of all the comradeship I was about to enjoy, stepped over the threshold.

  The place was crowded. The first man I recognised was big Nick Nevison, a smile fading on his broad, good-humoured face. Then I saw Moll’s curls falling down her lovely neck and back as it arched under the kiss of a Cavalier whose surprised eyes suddenly met mine.

  Mrs Melody saw me before anyone else did and swiftly made a path in my direction as Molly turned and pushed away from her Cavalier.

  ‘Michael! My dear!’

  As only she could, she swept towards me. ‘My darling. How lovely. And the only person here who could possibly help me.’

  But I felt physically sick. I couldn’t stop it. I stood there while men I believed to be comrades greeted me as heartily as they had no doubt greeted my betrayers. Molly had been first to say she loved me. I had based everything else on that. I reciprocated her feelings. And I had acted accordingly. She clearly used me, manipulated me. Lied to me. I had been naïve.

  I knew the people there well enough. I controlled my expression. I knew how they expected one of their company to behave. I did my best to show no emotion. I bowed to Mrs Melody and bid everyone else good evening. I was still furious at Moll’s mother for bringing my children to this dangerous place, but I now had unusual control of my emotions. ‘Certainly, Mrs Melody. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I was hoping you could escort me to the main gate. I have a taxi coming.’

  Although Mrs Melody had conspired in my deception, I found it impossible to refuse her request. Men of my generation were brought up to respond as I did. I bowed and smiled my farewells, especially to Moll, standing almost comically with her mouth open. The man behind her was, of course, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, inclining his head in response to my bow. Then I gave Mrs Melody my arm, bowed good evening to everyone in general, turned on my heel and escorted her from the inn.

  Outside, in the bustle of the day, Mrs Melody spoke quietly. ‘She had no intention of deceiving you, Michael. She was flirting, that’s all. I was supposed to meet most of the others in Oxford, but it became impossible. Nixer brought his mad Puritans. They could not leave the Alsacia undefended. It is our last meeting before circumstances alter for us. You do understand. She has always followed her heart rather than her head. I brought Molly. She wanted to see her—’

  ‘Please, Mrs Melody! If you don’t mind, I’d rather you said nothing. This should be between Molly and myself. At the moment I’d like to mention the matter of your taking my children from their home without troubling to ask me about it. And what on earth possessed you to bring them here? Especially if you anticipated an attack!’

  I don’t think she expected that. Her face carried a dozen expressions in a moment. One of them was pure fear. Helena had always told me that when I thought I was controlling my temper I was usually glowing like a red-hot poker. ‘I—’

  ‘Neither you nor Molly must ever do anything remotely like that again. I was going to ask why you chose to do it, but now I can say something simpler. I don’t want to see either of you again. Both of you will stay away from Ladbroke Grove. You will leave my children alone!’

  I had rarely seen anyone so placatory. I was almost embarrassed for her. ‘She was innocent of any intention to upset you, Michael, I promise.
It was my idea. I thought that, as your future wife, Molly should begin seeing Sally and Kitty.’

  ‘My future wife?’ Now I made an even greater effort of self-control. ‘I hardly think that is likely, Mrs Melody. I wish never to see either you, your daughter, or, for that matter, Prince Rupert, again.’

  Mrs Melody fell silent. We reached the gates. Because it was autumn the light was rapidly fading. A taxi dropping someone off on the other side of the little square came at my hailing it. I said goodnight to her as she climbed into the passenger seats. She avoided my eye. She gave an address in Bloomsbury. The taxi moved off and disappeared out of Carmelite Inn. I did not imagine I would ever see her again. I still felt sick, a little dazed. I couldn’t return home just yet. I had far too much to absorb!

  After a few moments I pushed open the gates and squeezed back into the Sanctuary. I wanted to be sure that I had actually seen what I thought I saw. I glanced towards the Swan. There it was, as I had always known it. You could hear the boisterous arguments, the bawdy snatches of song, the gusting laughter. I smelled the beer, heard the horses and ostlers in the stables. Someone rolled a beer barrel up a ramp. A long-established place with familiar customers. At least three centuries old. Yet not long before I had seen it a wasteland with every sign that invaders had brutally killed, maimed, raped and kidnapped, doubtless into slavery, every man, woman or child. Even the elderly had not been spared. Nixer’s men had laid waste to the Swan and the rest of the town all the way down to the foggy river. I was in an agony of self-hatred and loss. All that wonderful equilibrium. Molly happy. Her mother apparently happy. Helena happy. The children happy. No boat needed rocking. No china shop foresaw a bull. And Mrs Melody, for surprising and inexplicable reasons of her own, had charged into this perfectly balanced world, where everyone got the best from me and what they needed from me, and she had destroyed the balance. She was like the worst kind of villainess in my books. Insensate wickedness personified! That was how I felt, together with several other sometimes contradictory emotions and rationales. The Sanctuary had given me Molly. It now took her away.

  I couldn’t miss all the ironies involved. I had deceived Helena and then been deceived in turn. I was raging against Molly, her mother and myself. I even threw in a bit of anger at Helena. If she hadn’t been such a sneering rationalist I would have been there with her and never been involved with Molly. I felt very self-pitying. I thought of all the gifts they had received, all the encouragement, all the reassurances, thus putting a price on what had originally been a bit of ordinary generosity. And I was in a melancholy state, of course. I felt numb from head to foot. I was sleepwalking through a nightmare. I could see the symmetry of my situation and felt an ironic sense of conclusion. Wasn’t it what I had done to Helena? Didn’t I deserve it? But of course the mood was not to last long. Eventually the pain would come. And with it the lugubrious self-pity we all so despise in others.

  I wanted to go for a walk and think things over. I was very shaky. As I wandered down towards Blackfriars, near the river, another idea began to form. There might be a silver lining to this cloud, perhaps one Mrs Melody had anticipated.

  By the time it was twilight I found myself at the Monument, one of London’s particular collection of phallic erections. A distinctly late seventeenth-century style, by Wren. Built not long after the time Nixer and his men had destroyed the Alsacia. Another thought likely to give me a headache. I tried to shake the thought free. So now, in the sunset, I walked up Fleet Street and Queen Victoria Street, past Southwark Bridge and London Bridge, until I could raise my head and stare at the Monument itself, outlined against a deepening dark blue moonlit sky.

  I was fond of the Monument. It wasn’t unique in its basics. I didn’t know a capital without their Cleopatra’s needles or proud towers. Before 1960 or so, few public buildings, even Downing Street and Westminster Cathedral, had guards to stop you going in, no railings protecting them from the people. A stern sign was usually enough to scare away vagrants. They usually read simply NO LOITERING. Sometimes you might find one ordinary copper on duty but they were generally tolerant enough, depending on how you were dressed. I don’t even remember how or when all that security stuff started. Then, suddenly, it became routine to see British cops with submachine guns.

  The Monument was one of my favourite retreats until tourism brought a constant daily march of visitors up and down its 311 steps and everything was locked up at night. Built as symbolic thanks when almost the entire population of the city survived the Great Fire of London, it had some great over-the-top allegorical imagery, much of it serving to remind us that a benificent king had seen fit to restore his capital with all the genius of Wren and Portland stone, to endure against all the future fires that threatened her. Wingéd Time with the help of his servants Science, Architecture and Liberty lifted battle-weary London from the ruins of the fire, pointing to Peace and Plenty who, thanks to Industry and consequent Prosperity, lay in the future. As a boy I had first been attracted to the dragons, one of which represented the city. But the whole tableau, showing the king and his brother rebuilding and defending the capital, was as fascinating to me as any comic book. I had a similar love for the Albert Memorial.

  I wanted no company then, except the ghosts of my ancestors. Many believed the fire had cleared away the plague, too. It certainly gave architects like Wren and Hawksmoor a chance to build some impressive stuff.

  The door opened when I turned the handle. The steps were narrow and steep. It took a while to climb them. I still felt shaky. And then I looked out over the panorama of nighttime London with Tower Bridge and the rest in one direction and Whitehall in the other. Out of the rubble of the war’s great firestorms, the city was coming back to life. Massive, perhaps, and ugly, the new architecture reassured us that we were able to put up strong buildings to resist whatever an enemy air force could bring against us. Fortress London! We had to look A-bomb proof. Simple psychology at work, of course. That brutalism made us feel powerful again. The city had not yet been fueled by Thatcher’s fast-fix, get-rich-quick schemes which would characterise the ’80s, nor the wonderful grandiosity of buildings erected to display the power and taste of nations and businesses who were beginning to own more of London than we did. The council flats weren’t improved. All she did was get local authorities to clad them in jollier colours. Smoke used to be the sign of industry. Now, with mirrors, it is the sign of political spin.

  The foundation of the new postwar London was Hope. It was still down there somewhere. All you can see now are Fear and Greed. Hope and a determination to resist Tyranny in whatever form it came. Who remembers? Standing at the railings of the column, I found it a bit easier to believe our sustaining myth. How Evil Incarnate determined to destroy us; how a beneficent God had protected us.

  I enjoyed the moment. The Blitz and the Battle of Britain were the closest most of us would ever come to a proud myth based almost wholly on truth. A benign God was going a bit too far for me! I was a secular rationalist from a family of atheists. Almost everyone I knew were atheists. I was an Enlightenment man, through and through. My world had its roots in the late eighteenth century. Tom Paine was my guy. The evidence tended to be for a malignant rather than a benign God.

  Then I turned towards where I knew the Alsacia to be. I found myself again trying to clear my head. What had I seen? Where had I been? From here I could see over a large part of the city and nowhere was there a trace of Alsacia. I began to realise that I could go mad trying to explain everything or I could stay sane by accepting that the supernatural existed. It felt like a betrayal of all I’d been taught. But if I did accept the supernatural I could at least begin to think.

  Whose side were the monks really on? What had really happened to my friends in the Alsacia? All that devastation! It had been a pretty traumatic night for me. Had I witnessed a miracle or an illusion? Depression settled as I walked back down the circular staircase. I had probably witnessed an authentic miracle, but my girlfriend had tak
en up with her old lover. Not much compensation, really.

  With a thin drizzle falling, I walked to where I could get a bus. I had hardly thought of Helena and considered my original reason for visiting the Alsacia. I had told Helena I would sort it out. How would I explain what had happened? Well, first there was a mistress and her mother.… For some considerable time now I have not been going to a retreat but have been living with a lady.…

  I decided that it was in everyone’s interest that I said as little as possible. I could make a fresh start and put Molly, her mother, her lover and the Alsacia behind me. I walked up to the bus stop. The new electric streetlights formed pools of pale gold. The high surrounding buildings took on a denser, sharper look. They retained that ultrasolidity they sometimes had when you dropped LSD. This time I couldn’t put it all down to a couple of old monks slipping hallucinogens into my tea. Nonetheless, I remember thinking how like a trip some aspects of the experience were. Were those mysterious clerics creating an illusion shared by all inhabitants of the Sanctuary? It felt like something out of Phil Dick. What had I been drawn into?

  No TV programme or film came close to creating the reality of what I’d seen back there. I knew, of course, what war-ruined buildings looked like. But I also knew in my bones that I had witnessed something supernatural, in the full sense of the word. Something dangerously powerful and capable of terrifying acts of destruction and creativity. A lot worse than a few ‘redcoats’ making a raid. The English Civil War was the bloodiest in our history, when we lost a higher percentage of our population than during the first and second World Wars. I could believe such destruction and bloodshed had taken place. I could not understand how the evidence could so easily vanish. And the dead restored.

  I got to the stop just in time to catch the 15a. I went to the top deck and lit a cigarette. The bus turned up Farringdon Road. We passed Fleetway House. Much of my income still came from there. To me even that building had begun to look like a kind of temple. Until yesterday I had never for a moment believed in the existence of a deity. I had known my own visions were a trick of the mind. I had been certain the Alsacia had a scientific basis. But now I had witnessed an extraordinary resurrection! Now I had to accept the existence of God! The alternative was madness. Again I shivered in my boots at the implications of what I’d recently witnessed.