Edwin Begg was not the only resident to become famous with the general public. Wheldrake’s association with the old tavern, where he spent two years of exile, is well known. Audrey Vernon lived most of her short life in Dowson Mansions. Her lover, Warwick Harden, took a flat in Ibsen Studios next door and had a door built directly through to her bedroom. John Angus Gilchrist the mass murderer lived here but dispatched his nearest victim three miles away in Shepherds Bush. Others associated with the Square, sometimes briefly, included Pett Ridge, George Robey, Gustav Klimt, Rebecca West, Constance Cummings, Jessie Matthews, Sonny Hale, Jack Parker, Gerald Kersh, Laura Riding, Joseph Kiss, John Lodwick, Edith Sitwell, Lord George Creech, Angela Thirkell, G. K. Chesterton, Max Miller, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Margery Allingham, Ralph Richardson, Eudora Welty, Donald Peers, Max Wall, Dame Fay Westbrook, Graham Greene, Eduardo Paolozzi, Gore Vidal, Bill Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Trevor Story, Laura Ashley, Mario Amayo, Angela Carter, Simon Russell Beale, Ian Dury, Jonathan Carroll and a variety of sports and media personalities. As its preserves were stripped, repackaged and sold off during the feeding frenzy of the 1980s only the most stubborn residents refused to be driven from the little holdings they had once believed their birthright, but it was not until Edwin Begg led me back to his bedroom and raised the newly installed blind that I understood the full effect of his nephew’s speculations. “We do not rest, do we,” he said, “from mortal toil? But I’m not sure this is my idea of the new Jerusalem. What do you think, dear?”
They had taken his view, all that harmony. I was consumed with a sense of unspeakable outrage! They had turned that beautiful landscape into a muddy wasteland in which it seemed some monstrous, petulant child had scattered at random its filthy Tonka trucks and Corgi cranes, Portakabins, bulldozers in crazed abandon, then in tantrum stepped on everything. That perfect balance was destroyed and the tranquillity of Sporting Club Square was now forever under siege. The convent was gone, as well as the church.
“I read in the Telegraph that it required the passage of two private members’ bills, the defiance of several preservation orders, the bribery of officials in thirteen different government departments and the blackmailing of a cabinet minister just to annex a third of the cemetery and knock down the chapel and almshouses,” Begg said.
Meanwhile the small fry had looted the cemetery of its saleable masonry. Every monument had been chiselled. The severed heads of the angels were already being sold in the antique boutiques of Mayfair and St. Germain-des-Prés. Disappointed in their share of this loot, others had daubed swastikas and obscenities on the remaining stones.
“It’s private building land now,” said Begg. “They have dogs and fences. They bulldozered St. Swithold’s. You can’t get to the Necropolis, let alone the river. Still, this is probably better than what they were going to build.”
The activities of Barbican Begg and his associates, whose enterprises claimed more victims than Maxwell, have been discussed everywhere, but one of the consequences of BBIC’s speculations was that bleak no-man’s-land standing in place of Edwin Begg’s familiar view. The legal problems of leases sold to and by at least nine separate companies mean that while no further development has added to the Square’s decline, attempts to redress the damage and activate the council’s preservation orders which they ignored have failed through lack of funds. The project, begun in the name of freedom and civic high-mindedness, always a mark of the scoundrel, remains a symbol and a monument to the asset-stripped ’80s. As yet only Frank Cornelius, Begg’s close associate, has paid any satisfactory price for ruining so many lives.
“Barbican was born for that age.” Edwin Begg drew down the blind against his ruined prospect and sat on his bed, his frail body scarcely denting the great Belgian pillows at his back. “Like a fly born to a dungheap. He could not help himself, my dear. It was his instinct to do what he did. Why are we always surprised by his kind?”
He had grown weak but eagerly asked if I would return the following Wednesday when he would tell me more about his visions and their effect upon his life. I promised to bring the ingredients of a meal. I would cook lunch. He was touched and amused by this. He thought the idea great fun.
I told him to stay where he was. It was easy to let myself out.
“You know,” he called as I was leaving, “there’s a legend in our family. How we protect the Grail which will one day bring a reconciliation between God and Lucifer. I have no Grail to pass on to you but I think I have its secret.”
3 Astonishing Revelations of the Clapham Antichrist; Claims Involvement in the Creation of a New Messiah; His Visions of Paradise & Surrendering His Soul for Knowledge; Further Description of the Sporting Club Square Madonna; Final Days of the Antichrist; His Appearance in Death.
“Perhaps the crowning irony,” said the Clapham Antichrist of his unfrocking, “was how devoted a Christian I was then! I argued that we shouldn’t wait for God or heroes but seek our solutions at the domestic level. Naturally, it would mean empowering everyone, because only a thoroughly enfranchised democracy ever makes the best of its people. Oh, well, you know the sort of thing. The universal ideal that we all agree on and never seem to achieve. I merely suggested we take a hard look at the systems we used! They were quite evidently faulty! Not an especially revolutionary notion! But it met with considerable antagonism as you know. Politics seems to be a war of labels, one slapped on top of another until any glimmer of truth is thoroughly obscured. It’s no wonder how quickly they lose all grip on reality!”
“And that’s what you told them?”
He stood in his dressing gown staring down at a square and gardens even BBIC had failed to conquer. The trees were full of the nests crows had built since the first farmers hedged the meadow. His study, with its books and big old-fashioned stereo, had hardly changed but had a deserted air now.
I had brought the ingredients of our lunch and stood in my street clothes with my bag expecting him to lead me to the kitchen, but he remained in his window and wanted me to stay. He pointed mysteriously towards the Duke’s Elm and Gilbert’s War Memorial, a fanciful drinking fountain that had never worked.
“That’s what I told them, my dear. In the pulpit first. Then in the travelling shows. Then on the street. I was arrested for obstruction in 1937, refused to recognise the court and refused to pay the fine. This was my first brief prison sentence. Eventually I got myself in solitary.
“When I left prison I saw a London even more wretched than before. Beggars were everywhere. Vagrants were not in those days tolerated in the West End, but were still permitted in the doorways of Soho and Somers Town. The squalor was as bad as anything Mayhew reported. I thought my anger had been brought under control in prison but I was wrong. The obscene exploitation of the weak by the strong was everywhere displayed. I did whatever I could. I stood on a box at Speakers’ Corner. I wrote and printed pamphlets. I sent letters and circulars to everyone, to the newspapers, to the BBC. Nobody took me very seriously. In the main I was ignored. When I was not ignored I was insulted. Eventually, holding a sign in Oxford Street, I was again arrested but this time there was a scuffle with the arresting policeman. I went into Wormwood Scrubs until the outbreak of the Blitz when I was released to volunteer for the ambulance service. Well, I wasn’t prepared to return to prison after the war and in fact my ideas had gained a certain currency. Do you remember what Londoners were like then, my dear? After we learned how to look after ourselves rather better than our leaders could? Our morale was never higher. London’s last war was a war the people won in spite of the authorities. But somewhere along the line we gave our achievements over to the politicians, the power addicts. The result is that we now live in rookeries and slum courts almost as miserable as our nineteenth-century ancestors’, or exist in blanketed luxury as divorced from common experience as a Russian Tsar. I’m not entirely sure about the quality of that progress, are you? These days the lowest common denominators are sought for as if they were principles.”
&n
bsp; “You’re still an example to us,” I said, thinking to console him.
He was grateful but shook his head, still looking down at the old elm as if he hoped to see someone there. “I’ll never be sure if I did any good. For a while, you know, I was quite a celebrity until they realised I wasn’t offering an anti-Christian message and then they mostly lost interest. I couldn’t get on with those Jesuits they all cultivated. But I spoke to the Fabians twice and met Wells, Shaw, Priestley and the rest. I was very cheerful. It appeared that I was spreading my message. I didn’t understand that I was merely a vogue. I was quite a favourite with Bloomsbury and there was talk of putting me on Radio Luxembourg. But gradually doors were closed to me and I was rather humiliated on a couple of occasions. I hadn’t started all this for fame or approval, so as soon as I realised what was happening I retired to the travelling shows and seaside fairgrounds which proliferated in England in the days before television.
“Eventually I began to doubt the value of my own pronouncements, since my audiences were dwindling and an evil force was progressing unchecked across Europe. We faced a future dominated by a few cruel dictatorships. Some kind of awful war was inevitable. During my final spell in clink I made up my mind to keep my thoughts to myself and consider better ways of getting them across. I saw nothing wrong with the message, but assumed myself to be a bad medium. In my free time I went out into the Square as much as I could. It was still easy to think there, even during the war.”
He took a step towards the window, almost as if he had seen someone he recognised and then he shrugged, turning his head away sharply and pretending to take an interest in one of his Sickerts. “I found her there first, as you know, in 1933. And that one sight of her inspired a whole series of sermons. I came back week after week, but it always seemed as if I had just missed her. You could say I was in love with her. I wanted desperately for her to be real. Well, I had seen her again the evening I was ‘unfrocked.’ Of course I was in a pretty terrible state. I was praying. Since a boy I’ve always found it easy to pray in the Square. I identified God with the Duke’s Elm—or at least I visualised God as a powerful old tree. I never understood why we placed such peculiar prohibitions on how we represented God. That’s what they mean by ‘pagan.’ It has nothing to do with one’s intellectual sophistication. I was praying when she appeared for the second time. First there was that strong scent of roses. When I looked up I saw her framed against the great trunk and it seemed a rose drew all her branches, leaves and blooms together and took human form!”
His face had a slight flush as he spoke. “It seemed to me I’d been given a companion to help me make the best use of my life. She had that vibrancy, that uncommon beauty; she was a sentient flower.
“Various church examiners to whom I explained the vision understood my Rose either as an expression of my own unstable mind or as a manifestation of the Devil. It was impossible for me to see her as either.
“She stepped forward and held out her hand to me. I had difficulty distinguishing her exact colours. They were many and subtle—an unbroken haze of pink and green and pale gold—all the shades of the rose. Her figure was slim but it wasn’t easy to tell where her clothes met her body or even which was which. Her eyes changed in the light from deep emerald to violet. In spite of her extraordinary aura of power, her manner was almost hesitant. I think I was weeping as I went to her. I probably asked her what I should do. I know I decided to continue with my work. It was years before I saw her again, after I’d come out of prison for the last time.”
“But you did see her again?”
“Many times. Especially during the Blitz. But I’d learned my lesson. I kept all that to myself.”
“You were afraid of prison?”
“If you like. But I think it was probably more positive. God granted me a dream of the universe and her ever-expanding realities and I helped in the procreation of the new messiah!”
I waited for him to continue but he turned from the window with a broad smile. He was exhausted, tottering a little as he came with me to the kitchen and sat down in my place while I began to cook. He chatted amiably about the price of garlic and I prepared the dishes as he had taught me years before. This time, however, I was determined to encourage him to talk about himself.
He took a second glass of wine, his cheeks a little pinker than usual, his hair already beginning to rise about his head in a pure white fog.
“I suppose I needed her most during the war. There wasn’t much time for talk, but I still came out to the Duke’s Elm to pray. We began to meet frequently, always in the evenings before dark, and would walk together, comparing experience. She was from a quite different world—although her world sort of included ours. Eventually we became lovers.”
“Did she have a name?”
“I think so. I called her the Rose. I travelled with her. She took me to paradise, my dear, nowhere less! She showed me the whole of Creation! And so after a while my enthusiasm returned. Again, I wanted to share my vision but I had become far more cautious. I had a suspicion that I made a mistake the first time and almost lost my Rose as a result. When my nephew, who was in BBC Talks, offered me a new pulpit I was pretty much ready for it. This time I was determined to keep the reality to myself and just apply what I had experienced to ordinary, daily life. The public could not accept the intensity and implications of my pure vision. I cultivated an avuncularity which probably shocked those who knew me well. I became quite the jolly Englishman! I was offered speaking engagements in America. I was such a show-off. I spent less and less time in the Square and eventually months passed before I realised that I had lost contact with my Rose and our child! I felt such an utter fool, my dear. As soon as I understood what was happening I gave everything up. But it was too late.”
“You haven’t seen her since?”
“Only in dreams.”
“What do you believe she was? The spirit of the tree?” I did my best to seem matter-of-fact, but he knew what I was up to and laughed, pouring himself more wine.
“She is her own spirit, my dear, make no mistake.”
And then the first course was ready, a pâté de foie gras made by my friend Loris Murrail in Paris. Begg agreed that it was as good as his own. For our main course we had Quantock veal in saffron. He ate it with appreciative relish. He had not been able to cook much lately, he said, and his appetite was reduced, but he enjoyed every bite. I was touched by his enthusiasm and made a private decision to come regularly again. Cooking him lunch would be my way of giving him something back. My spirits rose at the prospect and it was only then that I realised how much I had missed his company.
“Perhaps,” he said, “she was sent to me to sustain me only when I most needed her. I had thought it a mistake to try to share her with the world. I never spoke of her again after I had told the bishop about her and was accused of militant paganism, primitive nature-worship. I saw his point of view but I always worshipped God in all his manifestations. The bishop seemed to argue that paganism was indistinguishable from common experience and therefore could not be considered a religion at all!”
“You worshipped her?”
“In a sense, my dear. As a man worships his wife.”
I had made him a tiesen sinamon and he took his time with the meringue, lifting it up to his lips on the delicate silver fork which Begg’s Cotswold benches had produced for Liberty in 1903. “I don’t know if it’s better or worse, dear, but the world is changing profoundly, you know. Our methods of making it safe just aren’t really working any more. The danger of the simple answer is always with us and is inclined to lead to some sort of Final Solution. We are affected by turbulence as a leaf in the wind, but still we insist that the best way of dealing with the fact is to deny it or ignore it. And so we go on, hopelessly attempting to contain the thunder and the lightning and creating only further confusion! We’re always caught by surprise! Yet it would require so little, surely, in the way of courage and imagination to find a way out, espe
cially with today’s wonderful computers?”
I had been depressed by the level and the outcome of the recent British election and was not optimistic. He agreed. “How we love to cling to the wrecks which took us onto the rocks in the first place. In our panic we don’t even see the empty lifeboats within easy swimming distance.”
He did not have the demeanour of a disappointed prophet. He remained lively and humorous. There was no sense of defeat about him, rather of quiet victory, of conquered pain. He did not at first seem disposed to tell me any more but when we were having coffee a casual remark set him off on a train of thought which led naturally back to that most significant event of his life. “We aren’t flawed,” he said, “just as God isn’t flawed. What we perceive as flaws are a reflection of our own failure to see the whole.” He spoke of a richly populated multiverse which was both within us and outside us. “We’re all reflections and echoes, one of another, and our originals, dear, are lost, probably for ever. That was what I understood from my vision. I wrote it in my journal. Perhaps, very rarely, we’re granted a glimpse of God’s entire plan? Perhaps only when our need is desperate. I have no doubt that God sent me my Rose.”
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 8