Similarly, the gulf between British fascism and militant Islam no longer seemed to be as wide as Phil had expected to find it. Hatred of black, Asian and Arabic people now seemed to take second place to anti-Semitism: all the talk was of overthrowing the Zionist Occupational Government, a conspiracy of powerful Jews which was alleged to rule the world with American (and British) corporate and military backing. Perhaps it was no surprise, therefore, to discover that white racists were prepared to make common cause with revolutionary groups from other cultures committed to the same idea, and that Osama bin Laden had been a hero to these people long before the September 11th bombings. And so it was now being argued in some quarters (mainly on the internet, in nationalist discussion forums), that true National Socialism had nothing to do with racism, but was simply a political system which allowed all peoples to return to their (separate) cultural roots and live in harmony with nature and God; and the only thing holding it back—the current “established world-order” based on capitalism, decadence and Godless materialism—therefore had to be overthrown by violent or subversive means.
Philip found that following the logic of these conspiracy theories was deeply treacherous and disorientating. He kept finding himself arriving at conclusions he agreed with (that Western society was decadent and valueless, for instance) and then having to retrace his steps and anchor himself in simple facts, concrete objects eliciting a gut response in which he could trust: the foul, racist language used in the anonymous letters to Steve, or the hate-filled lyrics on the Auschwitz Carnival CD. In the absolute incompatibility between these things and the mystical, almost poetical outpourings of the more articulate neo-Nazis, with their talk of Folk Culture, Soil and Honour, Philip struggled to find a moral position of his own. His overriding sense was that every system of values seemed to be in a state of flux, of melt-down, and that somehow New Labour itself was symptomatic of this, constantly talking a language of beliefs and idealism but in fact behaving with as much ruthless pragmatism as anybody else, and as deeply in thrall to its own God (the free market economy) as any Muslim fanatic. The figure of Paul Trotter kept coming to mind.
But it was all far too complicated to put into words. Sometimes he would draft a paragraph or two, and read it back only to discover that he himself had started to sound like a far-right sympathizer; and then half an hour later he would look at it again and find that it now seemed to be coming from the radical left. There didn’t seem to be a difference between the two perspectives any more; between anybody’s perspectives. At other times, what he had been attempting looked so massive and all-encompassing that he had started to feel like Benjamin, with his ever-evolving, never-completed masterwork: which, if its fusion of words and music had any precedent at all, harked back to Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a concept which had also turned out to sit far too comfortably with Nazi ideology. More complications! Philip couldn’t get a grip on this. He was much better off doing “About Town” again. He had it in mind to write some pieces about the Gas Street Basin, how its network of interlocking canals bore witness to the bitter rivalries between the controlling companies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These, at least, were the kinds of complexities he could handle. He would take refuge in what he understood; in what was knowable.
One evening, during the time when he was most deeply mired in his research on the book, Carol had said something interesting.
“Why are you so fascinated by all this stuff?” she asked.
And Philip explained, not for the first time, about the warmth and good feeling he had observed between Steve and his family, and how sickened he had felt when he saw the things that had been anonymously written about them.
“Yes, but what’s the point in dwelling on any of that? The people who do these things are just scum—lowlife. By writing about them you’re just glamourizing them.”
“Well, racism is a continuing problem. These letters prove it. The case of Errol McGowan proves it. So somebody should be writing about it.”
“But in a way, what you’re investigating isn’t racism. I mean, racism is everywhere, but it doesn’t announce itself. If you want to find racism, take a look inside Middle England and gatecrash a Rotary Club dinner, or something. There’s a whole lot of white, middle-class British people out there who basically don’t like black people—don’t like anybody who’s different to themselves—but they’re comfortably off and they’re in control of their own lives so they don’t have to do anything about it: except maybe read the Daily Mail and sound off about it among themselves at the golf club bar. That’s racism. Whereas the people you’re talking about, the people who organize, the people who go on demos and get into fights, the ones who talk about it openly—that’s about something different. These people are damaged. Their fear and their sense of powerlessness are so strong that they can’t hide it. In fact, that’s why they’re doing it—they want people to see their fear.”
“So what are you saying—that Combat 18 is a cry for help?”
“What I’m saying, Phil,” Carol answered, laying a hand on his shoulder as he sat chewing a pencil at his desk, “is that I know you. You can’t write about politics, you can’t write about ideas. It’s too abstract for you. You’re interested in people. That’s what this book ought to be about, if you’re ever going to write it: what drives people to these positions? And I think that maybe it’s started to fascinate you because in the middle of all this you think you’re going to find something out.”
“Something? What sort of something?”
“I don’t know. The answer to some riddle. The answer to something that’s been puzzling you for years. That’s why it’s started to take you over, this book.”
He had frowned at her, not really understanding what she meant; but her words had stayed with him, for many months, and they came back to him that November morning when he opened Benjamin’s letter and saw what he had discovered in Dorset.
Dear Phil [Benjamin wrote],
Harding is alive and well!
Or at least, he was nine years ago.
Last week I was staying down in Dorset with Mum and Dad, and Lois and her daughter Sophie. We were staying in an old castle which had lots of log-books which previous visitors had written in. And Sophie was reading them one night when she discovered this! What do you reckon. Is it our man, do you think?
All the best
Benjamin.
The photocopied log-book entry was on four separate sheets of paper. It said:
13–17 March 1995
They say that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and I very much wish that this were true. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, my home (to which I must return, heavy-hearted, in only a few hours) is an almost derelict caravan in the bleak north-east of England, permanently sited in a windswept field only twenty yards from a nuclear reactor and with the most physically and psychologically challenging sanitary facilities that I think I have ever encountered in seventy-five years of—in retrospect—futile and utterly miserable existence.
O, that the last of the Pusey-Hamiltons should have come to this!
It has been a joy, by contrast, to occupy this noble establishment for the last three days. If only I could have shared them with Gladys, my late and so very much lamented good lady wife! My late ex-wife, I should say. Not because she was fond of dressing up in latex (although there were, I must admit, two or three happy occasions when I persuaded her to do so, during my halcyon and fondly remembered days as secretary of the Sutton Coldfield Bondage and Rubber Fetishists Group, a circle of respectable citizens and taxpayers engaged in entirely consensual activities, which was nevertheless scandalously closed down by the West Midlands Vice Squad, despite its chief officer being, at that time, one of our most enthusiastic members. O tempora, O mores!). Now—where was I? Yes—I refer to Gladys as my late ex-wife not for that reason, but for two others: firstly, because she is now deceased (she died, I regret to say, within a few days of her 67th birthday, a
fter being struck on the head by a falling Maypole during a pagan fertility rite that got seriously out of hand); and secondly, because—and even now I can hardly bear to commit these words to paper—she also chose to leave me, to walk out on her loyal companion of almost forty years, shortly before our ruby wedding anniversary.
The circumstances surrounding this abandonment were widely reported in the newspapers at the time. Our marital dispute centred on a trifling misunderstanding. That summer, during an otherwise idyllic badger-baiting holiday in north Cornwall, I had taken her to visit a secluded cove (actually a good friend of mine, Major Harry “Grapeshot” Huntingdon-Down, then engaged in putting a private army together in a remote Cornish farmhouse), after which we took a stroll down to the beach together. There, I persuaded her to remove most of her clothing—not that it took much persuading: she had always, to be frank, been anybody’s for a half-pint of Old Peculiar and a couple of pickled onions; her virtue was not so much loose as falling apart at the seams—and to pose for a series of tasteful and artistic photographs which I took using my trusty old Brownie (whose name I temporarily forget).
Now, it was Gladys’s belief that these photographs were taken entirely for my own entertainment, and would not be made public in any way—except, perhaps, for framing one or two and putting them on the mantelpiece back at Hamilton Towers, to provide a talking-point when friends came round for an evening of bridge and conversation dried up over the saddled hare canapés. However, having inspected the results, I took a different decision. It would be stretching a point, admittedly, to describe her as an attractive woman at this advanced stage in her arduous and dissipated life, when the ravages of time had wreaked a terrible vengeance on a body which, even in the prime of her youth, had always inspired in me feelings of awestruck medical curiosity rather than sexual arousal. It did occur to me, nonetheless, that there were some sad and twisted individuals—long-term inmates of high-security penal institutions, for instance, or ageing Benedictine monks with severe visual impairments—who might, after a couple of strong drinks, find in Gladys’s naked form something to titivate their starving palates at the end of a long day. Accordingly, I decided to publish the photographs: and made them the centerpiece, soon afterwards, of the first edition of my new publishing venture—a magazine called Aryan Babes, which aimed to combine the finest in hardcore pornography with the most up-to-the-minute neo-Nazi news, features and comment, and which for some reason (a mystery to me to this very day) never caught the imagination of the reading public.
The magazine folded after three issues, and there was, I seem to remember, some nasty business involving police raids and the seizure of computer equipment and floppy disks. And then, after I had served out my three-year sentence (plus another four or five months added on for minor sexual offences committed while incarcerated), I emerged from my confinement only to find that Gladys had left me. Yes!—Flown the nest, and stripped the house of all its contents. Taken even my most prized possession—the framed photograph of Gladys and I shaking hands with “Benny” Mussolini. (People told me that we had been duped—that we couldn’t possibly have met him at the Eastbourne Winter Gardens in 1972—but it was envy, that’s all—sheer envy.)
Happily, I am pleased to report that towards the end of her life Gladys saw the error of her ways and came back to live with me. Our twilight years were perhaps the most joyous of all (she always did look at her best in the twilight—or perhaps better still, in complete darkness). But this has made my subsequent bereavement even harder to bear and it has, I will be the first to admit, been a desolate time here without her. For many weeks after she died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed—and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her. Of course, I never travel these days without my ouija board, and I communicate with her by this means every night. Sometimes we have the odd game of ghostly Scrabble together, the midnight candle flames flickering as she transmits her words to me from the other side of great River Lethe. I try to keep my spirits up by joking (“That was a dead heat!” I will quip, or “I’m facing stiff competition tonight”), but it’s not the same, not the same . . .
O Gladys. Life is so very hard without you.
I have passed the rest of my time here as productively as I can, making notes towards my great work, The Decline of the West, which I intend to publish privately in four volumes, bound in moleskin. In fact I have made great progress towards that aim this week, because the grounds here are overrun with moles and I managed to go out and brain more than thirty of the little buggers with the poker at dawn on Wednesday morning, after a particularly restless and unhappy night. When completed, I shall donate the work to the fine private library at this castle—along with my brief autobiographical sketch of childhood, a little memoir of the days I spent as a young stripling in Equatorial Africa, in the care of my father: a good and honorable man—firm but fair—as the title, Birched Before Breakfast, makes clear. Finally I will add a literary product of my later years, a small but useful handbook called The Accidental Onanist: an Illustrated Guide to 100 Solo Sexual Positions for the Divorced, Widowed or Quite Frankly Unattractive Male. All of which I hope will be of use and interest to future occupants.
It has been a pleasure—albeit a lonely one—to spend some time in this fine old corner of England; a pleasure to fly the flag of St. George above those ancient battlements; a pleasure to feel, for a few fleeting days, that it might one day again be possible to live in this country as our ancestors did, in a land that can and will be free, unsullied, as all men of truth and honour desire it to be.
Arthur Pusey-Hamilton, MBE.
Philip read this passage with mixed feelings. It brought back many memories of his schooldays, of the increasingly outrageous articles that Harding used to submit anonymously to The Bill Board. Sometimes, the arguments over whether it was possible to publish them had been long and vociferous: but they had always succumbed, in the end, to Harding’s humour, and to the conviction that no one could mistake the tone of these pieces for anything other than calculated irony. Often that irony had been almost too dark for comfort; often the milieu he wrote about—the lonely fantasy world of the Pusey-Hamiltons, with their traumatized son and their lunatic political beliefs—had seemed to be underscored by a real and unaffected sadness. But neither Philip nor any of the others had ever doubted one thing: that Harding was only doing it for a laugh.
Had he still been doing it for a laugh, nearly twenty years later?
As for the phrase “Albion resurgens”—well, that caused Philip a shiver of unease as well. He supposed it was a phrase that any literate British nationalist might be expected to use, and so would come naturally enough to the pen of someone who was satirizing the movement. But it was also, he realized now, the name of the record label that had released the “Unrepentant” CD.
Just a coincidence? Probably. But he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from making sure. After reading Harding’s words for the second time, he went straight into his email program, and sent a message. He sent it to the editors of the anti-fascist magazine who had already helped him with much of his research. Philip told them that he needed to come down to London and look through their photo archives again.
3
For once, the roles were reversed, and it was Doug who had come to Benjamin for comfort. He was in Birmingham to visit his mother, and one Thursday evening they drove into town together and went to a Japanese restaurant in Brindley Place. Benjamin sat mesmerized as the bowls of food revolved slowly on a little conveyor belt before his eyes, while they sat perched on chrome stools and drank chilled Gewurtztraminer from fine, fluted glasses.
“Can you imagine what life would have been like in the 1970s, if we’d had places like this to come to?” he said, dousing his king prawn tempura with soy sauce. “I would probably have ended up marrying Jennifer Hawk-ins. It’s no wonder that she dumped me. I remember for one date I took her to the chip shop
and then for the rest of the evening we just sat on platform eleven at New Street Station. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. There wasn’t anywhere else, in those days.”
“As far as I remember,” said Doug, “she didn’t dump you. You dumped her. In order to stay with Cicely. Interesting rewriting of history, though. I don’t know quite what to make of it.” He noticed Benjamin hesitating over a plate of maguro maki. “I’m paying for tonight, by the way—if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Slightly shamefaced, Benjamin took the plate from the revolving belt and added it to the collection already in front of him. “I’ll do the same for you some time.”
“No hurry.”
Benjamin spent some time attempting to pick up his rice roll with the chopsticks provided. It kept slipping out of their grip, and fell back on the plate so often that it was threatening to disintegrate altogether. Hunger getting the better of him, he used his fingers and polished it off in one go. “So what’s all this about you and Claire?” he tried to say, through the mouthful of food.