‘I saw you looking at this. What do you think it is?’
Ivo shook his head.
‘I suppose you think it’s rather beautiful.’
Ivo nodded.
‘It is, isn’t it?’
It was beautiful – it had been mounted on a gold plinth, and seemed still to look as glossy as when it had been alive.
‘Any guesses?’ said Julius.
‘Maybe . . . it was a favourite horse of yours and you cut off its hoof when it died as a memento?’
‘There speaks the country boy,’ said Julius, allowing his lips to curve slightly. ‘It is touching, that you would ascribe such charming motives to what is such a ghastly object.’ He moved closer to Ivo, so close that Ivo sensed his hot breath on his cheek. Julius was oddly free of any smell – no hint of sweat, or food, and certainly no cologne. ‘Can’t you feel the violence?’
Ivo shook his head. What on earth was he talking about? he wondered. He wanted to leave the room.
‘Look around you,’ Julius said expansively. ‘Look at all these exquisite, ancient objects. That painting –’ he pointed to a picture of a girl being led up to an altar – ‘that’s Iphigenia at Aulis. And we all know what’s about to happen to her, don’t we? She’s going to be sacrificed. By her father. So that the ships can sail to Troy. They lied to her, said she was going to marry Achilles. She was only young.
‘Sacrificed, for selfish motives. Or, sacrified for the greater good of Greece. What do you think? A wonderful father Agamemnon was.’ Julius laughed, loudly this time, the sound pealing like a bell into the corners of the room, filling Ivo with a curious desire to join in.
‘Look at all these things! Such beauty, such craftsmanship, and what do they all have in common? What is it that these paintings all share?’ His voice now fell, and he whispered one word: ‘Violence.’ He continued, looking very closely at Ivo, ‘What is it that man glorifies above all else? Has anything ever been achieved, Ivo, without sacrifice? Violence, Ivo! Think of Alexander the Great, think of Caesar, Napoleon, Churchill – every single one of them bathed in blood. Man would be nothing without it! We would be nothing without excess. Every day we carry on with our little lives, being nice to people, giving up our seats, chatting, endlessly, pointlessly. And we make these scribblings, these works of art, and what lies behind it? Darkness. Fear. Violence. We must embrace the darkness in ourselves, we must acknowledge it. We must release it.’
There was silence in the room, and Ivo was afraid to break it. He wanted to go, but felt that moving would somehow disturb the balance, that Julius might fly at him, hurt him, maybe even kill him. The only way out was the door, and Julius was between him and it. He shifted his eyes to the left, seeking escape, and saw a window, but it was too high up for him to reach. The only safe thing to do was to move away from Julius, and so he stepped backwards.
‘You seem frightened, Ivo,’ said Julius, saying his name with peculiar emphasis.
‘No,’ Ivo replied, in a way which would have suggested to even the least perceptive observer that he was.
‘It is good to be frightened,’ said Julius. ‘There is a lot to be frightened of.’
A door in the far vastness of the room opened, and a figure walked in; Ivo saw, with some relief, that it was Strawbones. Julius’s younger brother came loping forwards, a grin on his face. He was holding a bottle of wine, and had three glasses, held between his fingers carelessly. He approached without saying anything, set the glasses on a table and filled them; with a faintly supercilious gesture he held one out to Ivo and bowed, indicating to him that he should sit down.
When Ivo had sat in a tapestried armchair, both brothers sat too, on either side of the fireplace, facing Ivo. He took the opportunity to study them. How different they were, he thought: Julius with his studied calm, and Strawbones with his crazy charm. Both were smiling now, but still Ivo did not feel quite safe. He looked around the room. As well as the paintings filled with classical and biblical images, there were several portraits, hung high up on the walls. He saw one, nearest to him, of a man in an Elizabethan ruff, an earring hanging from his ear. The face was pale, the eyes prominent. He wanted to ask who it was, but his thoughts were interrupted by Julius leaning forwards and saying quietly, ‘Do you ever feel constrained, Ivo?’ Julius took a sip of wine, and placed it back carefully on the table, and then put his arms behind his head. Strawbones shifted a little and crossed his legs.
Ivo nodded. ‘Well – yes, I suppose so.’ He gulped at his wine glass, allowing the warm, fruity liquid to roll down his throat. His hand was shaking slightly. Come on, he said to himself, stop being ridiculous.
‘You’re a bright boy,’ said Julius. ‘Strawbones here has told me a lot about you.’
Ivo turned to Strawbones, who, flopping back into his chair, blew hair out of his eyes and said, ‘Yes, I have.’ Ivo took another gulp; without asking, Julius reached over and poured him a little more. Ivo’s mind was beginning to feel sharper and focused, and yet at the same time, whilst he felt he could do anything in the world, his grasp of physical reality seemed to be slipping. When he moved in his chair, he found that he almost knocked his glass over; he looked up shyly at Julius, who smiled. Ivo glanced round the room again, and his eyes alighted on another painting: a man in a wig, wearing a tricorn hat and a long, brocaded blue coat, slumping in a chair, his hands in his pockets.
It had stopped raining, and now the sharp winter sun was beaming in through the tall windows, striping light across the floor. Both Julius’s and Strawbones’s faces were half in and half out of shadow.
‘We think you have a very great future ahead of you,’ said Julius. Ivo considered this.
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
Strawbones lifted his glass quickly and drained it, his long, white neck flashing in the light, his blond hair streaming back. ‘We mean,’ said Strawbones, ‘that we think that you’re going to go far. Do you remember what I said, about the two great forces in this world?’
Ivo was looking at another portrait, a man in a red soldier’s uniform, his hair tied back, standing in front of a pile of classical ruins.
Julius had, almost without Ivo noticing, refilled Ivo’s glass again. Ivo picked up the crystal goblet, and held it in his hands, then took a large sip. The red wine was like velvet on his lips. ‘Tastes like strawberries,’ he said. Ivo’s mind was pleasantly fuzzy now. It seemed to him that Julius and Strawbones were both the friendliest people in the world. The room around him was taking on colours of extraordinary vitality, shimmering and rippling as he looked. He wanted, all of a sudden, to get up and dance. Though there was no music he felt an internal rhythm that wanted to burst out of him; he wanted to embrace Julius and Strawbones.
He noticed that Strawbones was looking at him and smiling, his long canines bared, and said, mistily, ‘Oh – yeah, I do remember. You said there were two . . . things in the world. Remember that. Whawassit?’ He laughed gently and slumped back in his chair. ‘Nice pictures,’ he said. As he looked at one of two men dressed like dandies from the 1920s, he said, ‘They look like you guys. Cool!’
Julius and Strawbones glanced at each other. Julius spoke, his soft, powerful voice creeping into Ivo’s cranium. ‘One force: the force of reasoning, of man’s intellect. The shadow in the picture in your aunt’s room.’
‘The other force,’ said Strawbones, ‘the force of will, of ecstasy.’ Ivo, as he looked at him, saw his eyes glisten. His limbs were limp and langorous, eyes green and wide.
‘We’ve seen your instincts, Ivo,’ said Julius quietly. Ivo laughed. ‘You respond to things in an interesting way. You have emotion, power, imagination.’ The Persian carpets on the floor started to shiver, their bright hues undulating, and the objects in the room took on some inner, demonic vitality. Now all the room became animated; the statue of a woman in flowing robes seemed to be opening and shutting its mouth
in silent screams, and then it seemed to be saying, ‘It’s OK, you don’t need to be yourself, you don’t need to carry around all that bundle of worries and anxieties and hang-ups that make you into the weak person you are. You can transcend that, you can join us.’
Ivo sensed that Julius and Strawbones were reaching out to him: their arms were extended, and they were clasping hands. Mentally, too, he felt that some great, intent force was focused upon him. It was an enormous opening up of his will; he felt the beginnings of ecstasy. Was it his imagination, or were vines and grapes springing from the ground around their feet? The two brothers got up, and walked towards a cupboard, opened it, and when they turned round, they were clutching a staff, which was glowing brightly. How can this be happening? thought Ivo. He felt inert, like a rag doll.
‘Come here, Ivo,’ said Julius, and held out the staff, which was radiating some strange light. It had all the warmth of the sun on a summer afternoon. It expanded, coming towards him, and Ivo knew that to be immersed in that light would be the greatest, most joyful moment of his life. He felt as if he had grown wings and could fly. Heat was concentrating itself in his stomach, seeping up into his heart, spreading out through his veins and arteries, sliding into his brain. He was alive to everything: to the shimmer of Julius’s wristwatch, to the glow of his polished shoes, to the deep blue of Strawbones’s shirt, the many colours of his plaited belt.
‘We can show you,’ whispered Strawbones, ‘what it would be like. To be totally free.’
Ivo was flushed; he was breathing heavily. He managed to pull himself up from the chair. ‘I . . . I . . .’ he slurred. Some part of him that was still conscious was flashing warning signals at him. The portraits: the man in the ruff, the man in the red soldier’s uniform, the tricorn hat, the dandies: they were all the same people. They were all either Julius or Strawbones. He turned his attention to the door, and saw that on the hatstand was hanging the multicoloured jacket of the man on the tube. That’s funny, he thought. That red embroidered jacket. The man on the tube, walking away from the death of Blackwood. A sudden burst of awareness came upon him; it was Strawbones.
He put his hands in his pockets, and felt the smooth bulk of the Koptor. His mind cleared, as if a veil had been taken away. He breathed deeply. The room stopped flashing and swimming around him. He saw the two brothers holding the staff, and his impulse was not to join them, but to run. They were facing him; the door was behind him. He made a sudden and desperate dash towards the entrance; he scrabbled for the handle, flung it open and leaped down the stairs and out on to the street and whizzed around the corner. Ivo wasn’t sure if he was being pursued, but he sprinted all the way up South Audley Street, and across Oxford Street, nearly being crushed between two huge red buses, and it wasn’t until he got to Charmsford Square that he stopped, panting and hot, feeling the sweat prickle down his neck. A kind of disbelief had shrouded his mind. He refused to accept that Strawbones was the man on the tube train, that Strawbones was at the centre of this insanity, that it all emanated from him. It was Julius, Julius who was the one, not Strawbones. It had to be. Ivo was devastated.
In the flat, Julius turned to Strawbones. Strawbones had flung himself into an armchair, mimicking the pose of his eighteenth-century counterpart. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose loudly.
‘You were right,’ Julius said to his brother. ‘There is power there.’
Strawbones shrugged. ‘Aren’t I always right?’
The sun went back behind a cloud; the room was still; the staff they had been holding had been returned to its secret place; Julius sat down.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Strawbones to his brother. ‘He’ll come round.’
‘Even so.’ Julius stretched and yawned languidly, his teeth showing white. He gripped the arms of his chair. ‘There will always be someone watching.’
.
Chapter Nine
Ivo called Felix immediately: he answered, after a few agonisingly long rings. ‘What’s up?’ he said lazily.
‘Now. We have to go to see Hunter now. Are you working?’
‘No, we’re off till five. Perky’s away. Mate, are you OK?’
‘Weirdness. Meet me outside your house, now!’ He hung up, hoping that the urgency in his voice was obvious. He paced up and down in front of the Rocksavages’ house, and eventually the door swung open. Felix slouched out, zipping up his jacket, and Miranda followed. They pulled the door shut and stood at the top of the stairs. Ivo started walking. Miranda turned to her brother, shrugged, and chased after Ivo; Felix came a little more slowly at first, and then ran to catch them up.
Ivo told Felix and Miranda what had happened, stumbling slightly as he tried to find words for what he had experienced when he’d been in Julius’s flat. A negation of the self, a feeling of total and extreme power, that one could do anything, in a frightening, brutal sense. It was, he imagined, like the feelings of those first tribes who reared their low forheads out of the stinking swamps and the fly-filled jungles.
Not, he said, that he had seen God, or even a god, but he had felt a powerful attraction which was not natural. He described the staff which Julius had brandished. He didn’t mention Strawbones. He still couldn’t believe it.
Felix chimed in: ‘The Thyrsos! That must be what Blackwood was talking about! The staff of the maenads.’
‘I saw it! I saw it in Julius’s flat.’ Ivo was suddenly sure that this was what the Koptor had been entrusted to him for. Its purpose was destructive. The breaker, the cutter.
They took the Bakerloo line to Kensal Green. It was dirty, grey and empty; they hardly saw anyone as they trudged along the dull streets, full of rows and rows of dingy Victorian houses. They eventually found Hunter’s street. A dog snuffled past them, ownerless. They stood on the doorstep, banging the fish-shaped doorknocker as hard as they could, and after what seemed like the longest time imaginable, it opened to reveal a short, frumpy middle-aged woman wearing a brown cardigan and a flowery dress, her dark eyes, as black as shoe polish, peering at them from under a careless fringe of hair, coarse and black, as black as the sky at night.
‘Alice Hunter?’ said Ivo.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘FIN?’ said Ivo expectantly.
She shut the door in their faces.
The three looked at each other. ‘I think I know what to do,’ said Miranda. She took the doorknocker confidently and rapped three times. It opened a crack and they saw Alice Hunter’s eyes peering at them suspiciously.
‘Freedom is nothing,’ said Miranda quietly.
Felix took the cue, and repeated the phrase; Ivo followed him.
Alice Hunter looked intently behind them, opened the door wider and they crushed in, Alice banging it shut behind them. Still reeling from the alcohol and his encounter with the Luther-Rosses, suddenly Ivo was confused, cornered in the passageway, by this pudding-shaped lady who pressed down upon him, sparks in her eyes.
‘What do you know about FIN?’ she demanded, eyes narrowing, hands fluttering plumply as she waved the three of them into a tiny sitting room. It was the opposite of Blackwood’s flat: scrupulously neat, with everything looking as if it knew its place and would never dare to leave it. But, despite the neatness, everything else was a riot of colour. The four walls of her sitting room were each painted a slightly different colour, as if she had tried each one out and then never got round to choosing one. A wooden table, painted dark green, sat in the middle, and the armchairs and sofas were covered in multicoloured cloths. The walls were crowded with photographs of Hunter and several other people, as well as a print of a dog poking its paw into a bath.
‘Sit, sit, all of you, so many of you, go on, sit. Did anyone follow you?’
‘No – well, I don’t think so,’ said Ivo, for in truth he hadn’t expected anyone to do so.
‘What do
you mean, you don’t think so? That’s not good enough, is it? They could be swarming all over the place. Here, wait. Acolytes,’ she hissed behind her.
She popped into the corridor like a champagne cork, Ivo heard the door being opened, and after a few moments shut again, and the sound of chains being drawn across the door.
She appeared again, looking rather martial.
‘Well then. Can’t be too careful. What’s your story then, eh? Who’s the leader? This one?’ She pointed at Miranda, who shook her head dumbly. ‘This one?’ pointing at Felix, who also shook his head, and indicated Ivo with his index finger.
‘You . . . what’s your name?’
‘Ivo Moncrieff, ma’am,’ said Ivo, and he felt as if ‘ma’am’ was the right thing to say, although she laughed at that, showing her teeth, which were mottled and pied.
‘So, Ivo Moncrieff, what brings you here?’
‘Blackwood – he gave me this before he was killed – he told us to find you.’ Ivo showed her the Koptor.
‘He gave you this?’ she snatched it from him and held it up to what little light came from a lamp in the ceiling.
‘But this is the Koptor!’ She looked at them suspiciously. ‘When did Blackwood give you this?’
Ivo explained what had happened to him on the tube platform; suddenly he was overwhelmed by the memory, its sharp, bright, fierceness, and he felt dizzy, limp and exhausted.
‘Here, you look like you’re about to keel over! Restoratives, that’s what you need,’ said Hunter, and all but pushed him back into a big, squashy sofa that smelled of dog and biscuits. She went briefly out of the room and came back with a glass of water. ‘Drink this,’ she said briskly, ‘and I’ll make you some tea.’
Without thinking, Ivo gulped down the water; he suddenly realised that, even though she looked completely innocuous, they had no idea whether they could trust this Hunter woman, and decided to be on his guard.
Five minutes later Alice Hunter had brought in a delicate teapot and four china cups with blue figures on them, and some biscuits arranged in a pattern on a plate. Ivo, Felix and Miranda were sitting crushed together on the sofa whilst Hunter occupied the only armchair.
The Liberators Page 9