The Whispering Swarm

  I heard a shout from nearby and looked back. From around the corner, ducking beneath the tavern’s low overhang, straight from a Dick Turpin story Tom Browne himself might have illustrated, rode a dramatically pretty young woman. Kitted in some sort of eccentric hunting outfit, with shining black thigh-high boots, doeskin breeches, a cutaway velvet midnight-blue coat, frothing lace at throat and wrists, she wore a befeathered tricorne on her long, red-gold curls. Pure Howard Pyle stuff. Even though she probably was dressed to rehearse for a coming pantomime, with herself as the ‘principal boy’, I fell instantly in love with the woman’s huge violet eyes and full, red lips. Almost riding us down, she struck one bold, appraising look back at me before cantering into the innyard yelling, I’d swear, for an ostler. An ostler? Was there a film crew in the upper galleries? Her horse was a beautiful chestnut stallion, furnished in oiled leather and silvered steel, his flanks flecked with sweat. Those brass-wrapped holsters on her saddle were big enough for monstrous horse pistols the size of carbines. I laughed, guessing they were making a movie about rural Ireland, and watched her long legs as she swung off her horse. My heart beat rapidly. I recognised her.

  She’d appeared often in a recurring dream I’d experienced several years earlier. Probably puberty had something to do with it! Then I’d seen her as my sister. Now the feelings she sparked were not brotherly. I wanted to follow her, find out her name. Of course I couldn’t possibly leave Friar Isidore, but the urge to do so was strong. I might never have the luck to dream of her again!

  Then the tavern was behind us. We turned left. With the fog still thickening, we reached a large stone building at the end of a cul-de-sac. We had reached a narrow Gothic archway and a door whose battered ancient oak and iron were older even than the first. Could that sight or the fog be causing the pressure in my chest? I drew as deep a breath as possible, observing a massive brass crucifix nailed to the door. No, not a crucifix, but more like the looped Egyptian cross. Beneath it, carved on a piece of wood, was a mysterious Greek inscription, Panta Rhei. Below this an iron grille was set into the door. Friar Isidore lifted the old black knocker and rapped out what was evidently a prearranged sequence. A dark brown eye gleamed on the other side of the grille, blinked as if in surprise, then disappeared.

  A moment later I heard the scrape and squeal of bolts and bars and then, feeling sudden alarm for no obvious reason, I was admitted to the ancient London abbey of that Most Pious Order of Old Flete Carmelite Friars.

  Friar Isidore drew a deep breath, as if in relief, and put his arm around my shoulders.

  3

  THE FISH CHALICE

  The door led not into a building but into stone cloisters running around a small courtyard, much of which had been put to lawn. Surrounding this were twelve squat yew trees whose massive trunks must have grown there for a thousand years. Lit at intervals by lanterns, the cloisters encircled the whole courtyard and were entered on the far side through another door, almost the twin of the one we’d used. The priory building enclosing the courtyard was partly of stone, partly of warm-red brick, its black oak beams standing out strongly through the fog, while the stone and mortar, on the other hand, disappeared into it. I loved this effect, especially when concrete was the grey material made to vanish. The smell of the yews and the fog mingled. A familiar stew: London! Town and country were always best when organically entwined.

  We took the mossy path leading directly across the lawn to the other door. I heard a robin ticking at us from the ivy as if we threatened her territory. A plump, cheerful, tonsured monk appeared in the doorway, looked up, recognised Friar Isidore and smiled, did not recognise me, and frowned. He introduced himself as Brother Constantine and fussed with a large key attached to the loose belt tied around his waist. Then, before anyone could speak, his brow cleared and he looked at me with an expression of genial welcome. Maybe he thought I was a volunteer? Turning the key again, he beckoned us back into the relative warmth of the priory church. Clearly this did not serve a large group of monks. We stood in some sort of vestibule. Directly ahead of us was a small nave from which emerged a very old monk, beaming benignly at me as if I were a long-lost nephew. ‘My dear boy! But you are early are you not? I was at my prayers and now I have an appointment with our—the treasure…’

  ‘This is our Father Abbot,’ declared Friar Isidore at his pause. ‘Father Grammaticus is a little absentminded. Possibly we should…’ As he spoke we followed the abbot back into the building. Suddenly the chapel was alive with gorgeous colour! From modern-looking, strangely abstract stained glass windows poured the most extraordinary vibrant light, flooding across the deep-yellow stones of the small nave. Standing before this on a plinth of its own was a tall, slender-stemmed silver-chased vessel I took to be a chalice. The vessel caught the last of the light as it passed through the rich glass and spread in a shimmering pool, an unstable halo throughout the chapel. Suddenly in that wild, uncertain brilliance the gilded pewter and green-gold-red enamel resembled a moving fish straining upward to the surface. The abbot appeared to hesitate before making a gesture towards the cup. He then turned, apparently baffled, as if listening to a voice we could not hear. By the set of his head he might even be taking instruction. He turned, spreading his hands in apology. ‘I had hoped to invite you here for tea, but apparently—’

  ‘We have had tea, thank you, Father Abbot, in those—in that—’

  ‘ABC,’ I supplied. ‘In Ludgate Hill.’

  The abbot stared at me, his mouth forming the words I had just spoken. I felt I had stumped him somehow. I had no idea what to say next.

  ‘Then you must come tomorrow. Around four?’ He looked behind us as if someone had brought him good news. ‘He saw our gate, did he?’

  Reflected light flared in his eyes. Then it was gone.

  ‘Oh, he did.’ The friar beamed; but for me, mystified by this exchange, the chapel was suddenly gloomy again and where I had been vaguely aware of a sense of joy I now felt something close to depression. ‘I had best be getting home I suppose,’ I said.

  Friar Isidore answered in surprise. ‘The fog. Aren’t you unsure? Isn’t it dangerous? If the gate has moved you could become lost forever as others have. You’ll be walking back?’ His concern betrayed a certain innocence. ‘Can you find your way?’

  I was charmed by him. I laughed. ‘Easily. Thanks.’ We shook hands, his dry, delicate, almost-transparent skin rustling against mine. I’d felt nothing like it. So old, so soft, so thin I thought I might tear it!

  ‘Meet me here at the bookshop by The Swan With Two Necks, at half past three,’ he said.

  For another instant the scene was framed in pearly pink light until the surrounding shadows merged and we found ourselves in the cloisters again, walking towards the outer gate. Then we stood in the little cobbled cul-de-sac with tall, leaning houses on both sides. The fog was deeper as we made our way back. From the warm windows of The Swan With Two Necks, that brick and daub half-timbered tavern on the opposite corner, came the stink of strong, bitter beer and the somewhat muted sound of voices lowered perhaps in conspiracy. Next door to the tavern stood the bookshop, still open, with shaded oil lamps flickering outside for customers to read by. A large tortoiseshell cat cleaned herself in the window. An old man with long white hair looked up from the book he was examining. On the other side was a spice merchant’s, its shutters already closed against the fog. I looked everywhere, hoping for another glimpse of the red-ringleted young woman who had ridden so furiously into the tavern’s courtyard. I pretended that I wanted to look at the books, but Friar Isidore hurried now. He took me hesitantly by the elbow to guide me towards that big gate. Did it, like some Inns of Court, still shut at dusk? A few oddly dressed women stopped their gossiping to glance with greater interest at the two of us. He opened the gate just wide enough for me to squeeze through, cautiously glanced out and waved a worried goodbye. ‘Godspeed, Master Michael!’

  With its exotic scents and queerly dressed people, this area was
more like Soho than the City. I hurried up towards Grays Inn Road. My footsteps gave off that strange muffled echo which defied location. Fog made the world timeless and spaceless. Of course I knew the route well enough, up to Holborn and from there to Brookgate Market, but I was coughing heartily by Chancery Lane. The more I saw of Alsacia, the less my lungs would be able to tolerate the familiar atmosphere of my boyhood, even though I had walked through worse pea-soupers. When the Clean Air Act came into force and it became illegal to burn the coal or coke which gave our fog its distinctive smell, the cities of England lost much of their lethal magic. We would never again see the coalman on his regular rounds, his sacks being counted in, hundredweight by hundredweight, to a million domestic coal holes. His work became a rural or posh-people’s trade, along with chimney sweeps and the old reliable street services, like knife grinders and crumpet men you once saw every winter. They were the common cultural-map references we thought would always endure. They vanished before you could turn around, like story papers and gobstoppers. And toy soldiers. While my mum worked I was even looked after by the horse-gypsies who had stabled their livestock in Brooks Mews. They had taught me to ride their ponies through the nearby streets and, like my aunty, tell fortunes with tarot or ordinary playing cards. A few years later, they were gone, absorbed into the rest of the community, lost in the fog of the past.

  In 1950 I was in Gamages buying boxes of Messrs Britains lead soldiers in all their glorious uniforms of empire and by 1970 I was fingering plastic GIs and wondering what had happened to all that gold braid, scarlet and navy blue enameled onto tiny hollow-cast military men. Sometime between 1957 and 1963 the world changed completely. I don’t think anyone noticed. After the war our world had been generally dull, poor and safe, much like the Depression 1930s. Even when they became Teddy Boys, the racetrack gangsters hung out in two or three pubs we all knew and avoided. By 1965, when money brightened it up, everything became fantastic and more dangerous. The TV seemed to reflect this. Unemployment was part of the cause. We lost the sweets factory, the Old Holborn factory, Cadbury’s chocolate biscuit factory, and the B&H dairies all in a couple of years. No wonder the air smelled so sweet. Then warehouses became worth more than the stuff they stored. Houses and factories became ‘real estate’. We got more crime, but there was also full-colour advertising, headlines on the front page, umpteen supplements, soft porn on page three, extra TV channels, home-grown horror comics, the Vietnam War and Technicolor Hammer films.

  Making my way through that particular fog, enjoying it as I always did, I could pretend I was in a movie, especially one of the Hollywood Sherlock Holmes stories. Many of my early memories were actually of movies. Anyone was allowed into the cinemas before they made ‘universal’ and ‘adult’ certificates. Long before they needed an X certificate. The movies were nearly always in black and white and full of fog. It took me years to realise there were other kinds of films. My mother liked musicals, too, but I associate my childhood visits to the local Rialto with a mood of grim melancholy. There weren’t too many happy endings in The Big Combo or They Drive by Night. Mum loved gangster pictures, preferably featuring misunderstood brutes: James Cagney, George Raft, Robert Ryan, James Mason, Sterling Hayden—the kind of men she would never have allowed into our house in real life.

  On that evening I quickly became used to the fog. I pretended I wore a fedora and a trench coat like a character in those American thrillers we loved so much. I experimented with the odd menacing cough. And, enjoying the echo of my own footsteps, I made my way accurately home.

  My mother still had her pinafore on, the souvenir Brighton one I’d bought her that summer. Our last holiday together. She had been worried sick, she said, though she seemed perfectly cheerful as she got supper ready. She hadn’t lost her wartime habits. Her relief at seeing me safe always overcame her anxiety. She needed to stay busy. Her friend, Mr Ackermann, had given her a job working at his toy stall in the market. She sold mostly Japanese tin toys, cheap and dangerous. I think he only kept the thing running so she had something to do.

  Mr Ackermann was of a keen-minded, philosophical disposition. He planned for the long term. Mum was intensely material, mercurial and of the moment. A tolerant woman, too, she fought with herself not to trap me. I’ve mentioned how she had become a superb liar, one who told and retold her lies until they formed an intricate fantasy so twisted through with strands of intense, bleak reality they often seemed thoroughly true. She became hugely anxious that someone would find out that she invented her stories. From fear of discovery she talked too much. If she stopped talking she knew she would die. She was terrified that someone would successfully challenge her accounts. The stories had almost no intended malice in them. They were fantasies to cheer herself up or give authority to her opinions. When she wanted to be hurtful she wasn’t all that good at it.

  I felt the strain when she lost touch with her audience! She forgot what she’d told to whom. Much of her energy became devoted to keeping one individual from meeting another in an effort to hide equally rich and intricate lies. Her life took on all the desperate intensity of a Whitehall farce. She would close doors on unexpected visitors, hide others in cupboards and talk loudly over a conversation she didn’t want you to hear. Comedy in retrospect, but nerve-racking while it took place. Only Mr Ackermann seemed unaffected. Maybe he believed her. His own early life before escaping to England had been equally fantastic as he was pursued across Europe by Nazis.

  I know one or two of Mum’s brothers believed she and their other sisters were putting on airs and graces, but they were just the innocent affectations of the petit bourgeois and easily understood and forgiven as mere wish fulfillment. My mother was Sarah Bernhardt compared to the others. Both her sisters were envious, afraid and amazed by what she made of them all. They were simply characters in a mighty novel she carried in her head and, to be fair, her heart. She created a Comédie Humaine of her own, longer by far than Gone with the Wind. My mother was flattered when men said she looked like Vivien Leigh. They soon discovered she was as confused and vulnerable as Leigh was said to be. And then they tended to fade away, back into the crowded pubs of Brookgate.

  Mum went to bed. ‘Good night, love,’ she said. I stayed up reading. There was no late-night telly in those days.

  Before I got ready for bed I looked up the Carmelites in my dad’s old Encyclopædia Britannica. He had bought it on the installment plan when he had thought to better himself before the war. Mum had made the rest of the payments. It’s where she got the details of all the foreign trips she told everyone she was making. It was almost brand-new and the thin pages were a bit damp, tending to stick together. But I found all I wanted to know. The order had grown up as some sort of loose community of hermits on the flanks of Mount Carmel. They might be originally pre-Christian, but Abraham, the prophet Elijah and Mary Magdalene all gave them spiritual guidance. Driven from the flames of Mount Carmel by one of Islam’s sudden and passing puritanical waves, they were forced to find patrons amongst Europe’s nobles. Slowly they grew reconciled to the loss of the Middle East as European fiefdoms. They came to London in the first quarter or so of the thirteenth century and had lived there according to their own laws since 1241. Anti-Semitic Henry III, with his reputation for piety, but unable to distinguish a Jew from a Mussulman, had welcomed a great many Christian refugees during his reign. And sure enough there had been an abbey on the site near Fleet Street for centuries and Alsacia (or Alsatia) had been built on the monks’ land. According to the Britannica, London historians generally agreed that, under the charter of King Henry III, the Carmelites were granted their grounds and priory on land bounded by the old ‘Flete’ River to the east, the Temple to the west, Fleet Street to the north and on the south by the Thames. Their cemetery abutted the river.

  Sometime after 1800 the friars and their abbot had been moved to St Joseph’s, Bunhill Fields. They left some dissenting brothers behind, probably due to a schism involving the Jesuits or the Jacobite
s or the Jacobins or someone. Those monks had apparently been seduced from the paths of righteousness by inhaling an evil miasma coming from beneath the original abbey’s foundations. Clearly the various arguments in the church were all about ordinary politics. My own political viewpoint was based on the writings of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the mutualist Uncle Fred admired.

  Next morning, I looked through the collection of miscellaneous prewar boys’ weeklies I still picked up whenever I came across them. The other fanzine I did, Book Collectors News, was mainly for story-paper collectors. I remembered an issue of Claude Duval from the 1900s which mentioned some sort of thieves’ quarter near Fleet Street. I only had two issues and I found them easily. Claude Duval weekly, Issue 6, Price One Penny, The Armed Men of Alsacia, 10 January 1903, with a fine blue-and-red cover by ‘R.H.’. The Masked Cavalier himself! Claude on horseback in all his cavalier finery leaping over a massed pile of barrels while his enemies, corrupt but pinch-lip’d Roundhead redcoats, shoot and slash at him without apparent harm to the laughing highwayman who defiantly doffs his splendidly feathered hat and passes effortlessly over the barricade. A great story, part of a continuing serial, printed in eight-point type, which most adults could only read with a magnifying glass, but from long practice was perfectly legible to me! Claude was in Newgate, awaiting execution, having posed as Lord Wilde, the king’s confidante, in order to let the real lord escape. I began to read it during breakfast until my mother stopped me. It was bad manners to read at the table. I started to tell her of the Sanctuary. In The Armed Men of Alsacia the quarter seemed to occupy a lot more space than the one I had visited. But she wasn’t really listening. She talked about some problems my Auntie Molly was having with her suppliers and the rotten little Court kids coming over to nick stuff off the stall, thinking she was born yesterday.