The Whispering Swarm

  I was already fascinated by the way modern mythology took characters from different eras and put them together. Tarzan ran strips featuring Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Texas Jack and Calamity Jane all together in the same story. Why should I be surprised if a B-movie featured so many heroes from disparate times? I would hardly have been surprised to see Tarzan, Lord Greystoke or John Carter of Mars sipping cognac in the private snug. But I was also confused. Why didn’t I, as a journalist, know about some locally made, reasonably expensive historical film? We got all the film companies’ publicity material. I‘d heard nothing of a play or a movie featuring so many famous heroes and thieves from fiction and history. The more I listened, the more obvious it was that the general conversation of these men wasn’t that of actors. They told stories of horses and transport in general, more like men who worked on the buses. Had they been hired to give authenticity to an elaborate pageant? Reenactors we’d call them now.

  I was beginning to like the slightly more fantastic idea that the whole area was some kind of posh psychiatric hospital, hidden away in the busy, bustling heart of London. It could have been here for centuries, like other, similar institutions. Maybe the white friars ran a madhouse? The ‘Sanctuary’ certainly sounded like a loony bin. Where I’d visited my mad Uncle Jimmy near Streatham had a name very much like it. You’d think it was a convent or private estate unless you had relatives or loved ones there. That’s why it was so hard to find!

  Loonies or not, I enjoyed their company. Moll paid me a great deal of attention, which of course was flattering. I remembered the morning warmth of her, through those nightclothes. I was already in love with her smile. She was genuinely interested in my writing. Back in my cups I decided very quickly that she was my soul mate. I’d dreamed of a girl who aroused these same emotions. Clearly she was interested in me. I had seen more than one film where a glamorous star fell for the fresh-faced kid with that special something and a talent for rock and roll. The cinemas currently were stiff with them, trying to catch the ‘youth market’. Meanwhile, my beard was well on the way. Other kids tried to look like Elvis or Buddy Holly, but I wasn’t modelling myself on a contemporary pop star. The coolest guitarist I knew in Soho was a dandy called Max Stone. He was probably the first mod, with his white button-down shirt, slim black tie, black coat, black narrow trousers. When we met he had this cool, slightly satanic Van Dyke beard and moustache. Sort of cavalier, very self-contained, he played like Django. There really wasn’t anyone cooler than Max. A lot of these guys came close, though. I again heard that faintly old-fashioned accent. It reminded me of Edwardian upper-class London and was almost like modern cockney. I had heard very old ladies in Gamages speaking like that when they ordered school uniforms for their granddaughters. Years later I met Irene Handl. She had the same natural accent. In fact all the voices, as I listened, seemed to have unfamiliar accents. I think my imagination made Pecos Bill’s seem Italian. Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson sounded what we used to call ‘educated’ American: soft-voiced and every word and letter articulated. Half their vocabulary was foreign to me but that was true of whichever vocabulary was not my own.

  While all those good-humoured heroes enjoyed a drunkard’s lunch, I didn’t drink much myself. My horrible hangover was at last subsiding and I wanted to look my best in front of Moll. I was scarcely staggering when the big clock over the landlord’s station chimed three. I expected the tavern to begin closing. This publican however showed no fear of a copper’s helmet. I admired his cheek. I let Moll draw me to her. I was relaxing my guard when Tom King, creeping up from behind, got too amorous. She clearly did not like his touch and wriggled away from us both, flouncing upstairs. She paused in the semidarkness of the first landing and blew me a kiss. Her voice was low, directed at me. ‘Meet me here tomorrow evening. Perhaps we’ll do something.’ She winked.

  I nodded, blushed and, feeling the need to escape Tom’s boozy glare, made my way out to the street and down to the old bookshop, hardly looking at the titles until slowly it dawned on me what an astonishing stock the shop had. There were editions going back to Elizabethan times, huge books by William Blake with hand-coloured engravings, volumes of Peregrine Pickle and Don Quixote as sharp as the day they were printed, with uncut pages. There, too, were Victorian three-deckers in glittering gold stamping, side by side with brightly dust-wrappered Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace, and mint modern paperbacks. Fascinated, I was tempted to buy a few copies, but I made myself step outside to inspect the cheaper boxes. I remained a little breathless as I swayed above the shop’s ‘All One Penny’ boxes, picking over volumes of sermons and amateur histories with as much concentration as I could muster, clinging a little too firmly to the wooden sides, aware I must be flushed and needing a bucket or two of mouthwash to make myself even modestly presentable. I heard a faint, amused cough behind me. The lugubriously amiable friar offered no sign that he was aware of my condition or indeed that I had failed to keep my last appointment with him. He greeted me with genuine pleasure, thanking me for my punctuality. ‘We live by the clock, of course, but I have learned that others are not so quick to note time’s blazing.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so late,’ I said. Was he joking?

  ‘But you are not late!’

  ‘You’re very kind. It must be days.’

  ‘Did we not agree to meet at this time?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Then if we agreed to meet at this time, this is the time we agreed to meet.’

  A bit confused, I smiled. ‘If you say so.’

  Friar Isidore slipped his arm in mine. Beyond the confines of a few universities, this gesture was rare in a man. If anyone else had made it, I would have felt uncomfortable. He didn’t guide me through the streets, but rather assumed we both walked in the same direction. We turned up the cul-de-sac and passed through the yew hedge and across the grassy quadrangle. We came to that same abbey door and entered the Gothic vestibule just as men’s voices rose on a single resonant note. Afternoon light filled the place. A rainbow of warm colour. Two monks stepped forward to lay on the altar a living tree branch from which a little green fruit grew. We quietly took the pew at the back. I was fascinated.

  Another monk entered carrying that wonderful chalice on a cushion of green and blue. The chalice kept changing its appearance in the light. It resembled a glorious fish standing on its tail. Its almost-human mouth seemed to open and close. The yearning eyes were alive with an inner light. The chalice thrust gracefully up towards the sun, moved by the rays into the semblance of a living creature, used almost casually in a ceremony which felt inconceivably ancient. Far, far older than Christianity. I assumed the chalice was only brought out on special occasions. What on earth was it made of? How was the illusion created? The altar was bare except for the branch and cloths. There was no crucifix. The pulpit was occupied by Father Grammaticus, the same little old man with sharp, button-black eyes, whom I had met before, his frail hands folded in front of him, his head lowered, as if in contemplation.

  Their voices falling to a final amen, the monks at prayer all swung about as one to smile at us. A great disparity of ages, races and features. Then they returned their attention to the pulpit, to the Father Abbot who had only to murmur for his voice to be heard clearly. ‘Does it ever occur to us to wonder about the real place of religion in today’s human affairs?’ A conventional enough question I had heard many times on BBC radio, usually at the beginning of a sermon by the radio vicar.

  Next followed a set of references so strange to me that I had no idea what was being said. Some words in an unfamiliar language, maybe Greek. Then came a short prayer in what I thought was Hebrew. Some Arabic! I wondered about that service. Few could have had as solid a secular upbringing as I, yet I felt there was something unusual in his words, something moving. Spiritual? Authoritative? Aggressive? I reminded myself that this was a group of people who probably took the ordinary religious stuff for granted. They wouldn’t really need the same pep talk
s as the man or woman in the street. I also felt a bit uncomfortable not knowing the rituals, in spite of their obvious welcome, and was relieved when they finally rose and filed from the pews until all that was left were the green branch on the altar and the Father Abbot beside it, moving it slightly so that it would be in some imagined sunlight the next morning. ‘I love these darkening early winter hours, but they are unforgiving to cut boughs or flowers,’ he murmured, as if to himself.

  When the old man turned he was expectant. He reached towards me in welcome and gestured for us both to follow him. We went out of the side door and into the cloister again. I shivered. It was already growing cold. The sky darkened to grey and a few crows flew over, calling to one another, a foraging family returning home. I could smell wood smoke mostly, but there was coal in there, too. The dust of a million years. Every ancestor, every invader, almost every relative who had not fought or died abroad was in that air. We opened another old door and found ourselves in a sparely furnished, yet comfortable, sitting room. I saw several holy objects on the walls, including what I knew as an Egyptian cross, an ankh. Yafuz, my Turkish friend at school, had taken one to his eleven-plus exam. It was supposed to bring good luck.

  Friar Isidore and I sat down together on a wide, surprisingly comfortable bench. A monk brought tea, milk and sugar and freshly toasted teacakes to the low table. Sitting across from us the abbot himself poured the tea and offered the cakes. They were tasty enough, although the butter or possibly currants had an unfamiliar tinge. I was too polite to take any jam when neither of my hosts did. I had been brought up with austerity manners and rationing had only recently ended. Similarly, I had to be pressed to have a second cup of tea, even though it was probably the richest, most delicious brew I had tasted in my life.

  Friar Isidore murmured some excuse and left. I remained with the old abbot. Just as if I were drinking tea with a rarely seen relative, Father Grammaticus asked me about my mother and father and my schooling. I answered in a very straightforward way. Unlike a lot of lower middle-class English families mine had no tradition of reticence. The abbot seemed perfectly at ease with my story, nodding as if most of it was already known to him. He was no more or less interested in my religion or lack of it than in my similar failure to engage with mathematics. I told him I had done poorly at school and had left at fifteen. ‘And what would you be reading today?’ he asked, glancing at my pocket.

  A little shamefaced, I showed him the Science Fantasy still there since Barry had returned it. He laughed when he saw it. ‘Oh, it is not such a fantasy.’ He turned it over in his delicate hands. He looked at the bright picture on the front, predominantly scarlet and yellow to represent hellfire, showing a winged Egyptianate cat, a satanic-looking conjurer in white tails and a rather scared-looking young couple. He flipped through. He nodded over it slowly. I could tell that he’d never seen or read anything like it. ‘These symbols are not exactly what I recognise.’ Then his face cleared. ‘Aha! It’s a book of fables. I understand.’

  ‘I write such things,’ I told him. ‘And I tell tales of people like Robin Hood and Claude Duval.’ I remember smiling in a self-deprecating way. I was leading up to asking him about all the people I had met at the inn.

  ‘Duval? It’s an uncommon name, but we have a rogue calling himself that who comes to mass once a week. More often than most of his fraternity.’

  ‘They’re actors, aren’t they, sir?’ I asked, anxious to get a clearer idea of who those costumed men might be.

  ‘Oh, indeed. Actors, vagabonds, cheap-jacks, rum pads and balladeers all of them. I doubt there’s one rascal lifts an honest hand, but they’re amiable fellows well enough. Plenty of good hearts beat beneath the robber’s weeds, as we say.’

  So I was disappointed, getting little information for my question, though impressed by the old man’s tolerance, if that’s what it was. I listened politely while Father Grammaticus told me a little of the abbey’s history and the history of Alsacia in general, but I had already read most of it. ‘It’s astonishing to me that you have managed to remain in this one location for so long,’ I said.

  ‘We are blessed in many ways.’ He smiled rather sadly. I wondered what price they had to pay for their longevity. ‘And we keep our numbers when so many, I read, are losing theirs. It seems a greater darkness than ever hangs over this century.’ He smiled again. ‘Or did so. God, after all, does not understand time as we. Time is drawn to Him and radiates from Him. Do the living and the dead coexist? Do the real and the imaginary share the same world? Do we bring the myth into the reality by invoking our sense of romance? Does God answer an accumulation of yearning or just a solitary, well-intentioned prayer? The following forty or so years might prove calm, contemplative, even a little progressive in coming to terms with God’s purpose for those of us remaining on Earth. Perhaps the atom bomb will frighten us into thinking a little better. And of course, we remain vigilant.’

  I had barely followed his train of thought but this last pious remark was one I could easily agree with.

  After asking me my age and exact birthday, day and hour, which I could answer because my mother, a believer in astrology, had told me, he rose and showed me around his room. He pointed out relics and holy objects so proudly that I felt obliged to answer with as much interest as I could muster.

  ‘Perhaps? Perhaps that’s the secret whose answer we all seek. Peering into the fog.’ In front of me a patch of dark grey mist had formed. As I stared into it I heard the abbot’s gentle, rhythmic voice.

  ‘Think of nines and threes and twelves. Think of the cards with those numbers. Think of the fool. The child rides from the sun. The wheel turns. Nine swords pierce the hanged man. Nine wands support him. His queen is the Queen of Pentacles. See her?’

  Why did I understand what he was saying? My queen was the Queen of the Moon but I gave my fortunes to the Queen of Pentacles and suddenly all I saw was soft, molten mercury. No, I saw silver behaving like mercury. What did I see? Silver wall rippling like a curtain. The Phoenix, the Scholar, the Goat and the Lion knew my fortune but it was hidden in the Sphynx. The Ace of Wands and the Nine of Pentacles. The Twin Lovers. Soul mates. The Fool took the road. The mercury parted and something shivered there. I was dreaming. I had lost my bearings.

  ‘Follow the path the Green Knight blazes,’ said Father Grammaticus softly. ‘If you are ready.’

  I wasn’t ready. I fell back. The Green Knight? Some Arthurian legend? Something I had done or thought or seen in my mind’s eye—perhaps everything I had done, thought or seen—I felt horribly sick. I was frightened. As our conversation continued it seemed that I listened at a distance. I heard my own voice as far away as Father Grammaticus. ‘Who is the Green Knight? How do I find the road again? Is there a map?’

  ‘It’s there, in your own mind, ordered and prepared since you were born. The dark aether flows there as it flows between the worlds. You need to find it. Most of us have it. An instinct requiring a discipline. An inherited ability. A divine gift. Which, of course, are the same. By means of it you travel easily between our world and its peers. Something which is far harder for us to do, but easy for you once you discover your instinctive discipline.’

  ‘My discipline?’ I asked. ‘And yours?’ I was dreaming. Caught in his spell. Fascinated. I wondered briefly again about drugs.

  ‘I suppose I have more than one. By reason of my work, you know. My real love, because it reveals so much of God’s plan, is more sophisticated. But here…’

  He stood up and touched something under his desk. ‘I believe the prince will eventually wish to show you his larger and more sophisticated version.’

  Who was the prince? The same as the Green Knight?

  I watched the leaves of the desk’s top fold back on silent hinges and disappear into the body. A vast, blooming flower. Slowly he turned an invisible crank. I had only once seen anything like it, at the Royal Eise Eisinga Planetarium in Friesland, the Netherlands. An orrery from the mid-eighteenth cent
ury. But this was far more complex. From the interior, unfolding on subtle hinges, rose an extraordinary, complicated network of silver wires, slender steel rods, delicate brass cogs and golden spindles, expanding until it seemed to fill the room. Like a mad, joyful clock it vibrated and spun, clicked, chimed and whirred! Then at last it lay before me in silence. How old was it? An orrery, but of such extreme complexity I could not begin to see all it represented, certainly not the sun, moon and planets. Yet there were many spheres of different metals and size. I was fascinated. Delighted. Technically, building the thing was just about within the possibility of, say, seventeenth-century ingenuity. But the skill displayed was astonishing. It was worthy of Leonardo. I was mesmerised by its complexity. I stared unthinking into its rods and cogs, which were spinning and whirling in impossible intricacy.

  On the other side of that extraordinary web I saw the beaming face of Father Grammaticus as he reached into the orrery, passing his long-fingered hands to and fro. ‘We enjoy certain privileges in the Abbey of the White Friars of Alsacia. Men come here to exchange knowledge as well as to reaffirm their faith in our Creator. The scholars of Arabia. Of Jewry. Of Europe and Africa. Since 1241 we have enjoyed an existence which has been mostly peaceful. According to our charters, everlasting and inviolate, made by those holy monarchs Henry III—in whose name we repent the special Sin of the Christians—and James II of England—in whose name we repent the Sins of the British, we offer sanctuary to all persecuted sinners in the name of our Creator and His prophets.’

  ‘What—?’ I wasn’t sure what was happening. I certainly did not feel as bad as I had done when I first turned up, though. My mouth was dry. I had trouble focusing. Again I wondered if Father Grammaticus hadn’t put something in my tea! ‘The Creator? The Sanctuary? You believe what?—That this is a model of Creation?’