The box also contained a yellowed newspaper cutting about Phillip Youlden—apparently missing long enough to be presumed dead—reporting that his “personal effects” and surviving artwork would remain in the keeping of Katarina Garside at his last place of residence, Plas Gwyllion, in South Wales.
Rupert had underlined the name “Katarina Garside”, and the name of the house.
This seemed to be a useful source of further information, but all my initial attempts to contact the woman failed. She appeared to live completely cut-off from the outside world.
I sent several letters, and eventually received a frosty reply in the form of a standard printed note explaining that the collection was not currently available for viewing. I wrote yet again, telling of my experience at Bullingers, and the effect that the Chapel drawing had on me.
In a matter of days I received a reply in a large and expensive-looking envelope, written in spidery copperplate, from Katarina Garside herself.
She had not thought, she wrote, that she would ever see The Chapel of Infernal Devotion mentioned again. She knew the picture well, and was very keen to know who had bought it.
It struck me that if she was hoping to prise it from the icy hand of Bentliff, she was deluded.
She added that she would be willing to see me at any time.
It didn’t seem to occur to her that I would not be able to drop everything at a moment’s notice.
As it happened, I was temporarily unemployed at the time, and had a little saved up. The opportunity to see more of Youlden’s work was a prospect I couldn’t resist. A short stay at Plas Gwyllion was arranged, and reassuringly detailed directions sent.
The day of my journey began misty and cold, and visibility gradually degenerated so badly that I eventually reached the Severn Bridge with my lights on full-beam. By the time I crawled past Tintern Abbey, the ruins were swathed in dense fog.
I was none too keen on negotiating narrow, unfamiliar lanes in such conditions, but as I followed the directions I began to climb into clearer, if still misty, regions. Passing through dense pinewoods, I emerged briefly only to turn between high banks littered with grey limestone rocks. The car juddered over slabs of the same material. The banks were crowned with Thorn trees distorted into grotesque shapes by the prevailing winds.
I came out at length onto the mountainside with a wide prospect before me, hollows still shrouded in fog, the higher ground dark and formless except for the odd clump of pines, or far glimpses of falling water.
A single column of stone towered against the sky. As if recoiling from its threat, the road bucked and twisted away, back into the trees. Creeping around the umpteenth sharp bend, I was suddenly confronted with a massive house set in a natural amphitheatre of sombre forest.
The effect was to make me brake hard and sit for a moment, peering through the labouring windscreen wipers and laughing out loud.
“It’s actually happened.” I thought to myself, “Finally, it’s actually happened.”
I had lived out my favourite opening to a story.
There was no getting away from it. Through the whole of what had undeniably been a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, I had been travelling alone (by car, not horseback, admittedly), through a singularly dreary tract of country, and had found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
It was, of course, Plas Gwyllion, but in all conscience it was close enough.
The first impression was of a mausoleum for giants. Some mad genius had built a compact little château in French Renaissance style, then thought what it really needed was to be smothered in stone carvings of heraldic beasts, gods, gargoyles, warriors, spiral columns, and a variety of disturbingly convincing anguipedes.
It would have been no surprise at that point to glimpse Pan amongst the trees, or a monstrous face, à la ‘The Inmost Light’, at a window.
After minutes of knocking repeatedly at the heavy Venetian door knocker, I got the uneasy feeling that my arrival had been forgotten. Eventually the door was opened by an elderly maid, who explained that Mrs. Garside was unavailable, but that a meal had been set up in my room upstairs. She led me up to a cold, damp bedroom with a massive four-poster bed and a barely edible cold repast.
Although I was tired, I slept fitfully, and awoke repeatedly in the night to the sound of some bird shrieking far off.
I breakfasted alone in a huge dining room on porridge, kippers and lapsang souchong from a massive pivoting silver teapot with a lion spout that must have been worth a fortune. Having still not seen my host, I decided that I might as well explore.
The foul weather had passed, and a pallid sun was glinting intermittently between dark clouds as I skirted the house, getting saturated by dense shrubbery, and walked through a formal garden long gone to seed. Weeds were rampant. I struggled through briars, edging around a choked-up fountain. In the distance there was a summerhouse that must have been quite elegant once, but was now ramshackle, with a partly caved-in roof. Statues were being slowly throttled by creepers.
In the middle of what might once have been lawn, now waist-deep in weeds, stood, of all things, a scarecrow. It was clad in an old dress, its head an explosion of saturated straw, gangling arms hanging limp, its oversized hands clawed threateningly.
I felt a distinctly M.R. Jamesian qualm when it turned and moved towards me. Then the figure called out, and I realised I must be looking at Katarina Garside.
Her uncombed mane really did look like straw. The thinness of her bare arms made her bony hands, which were of a span suggestive of a pianist, look even more enormous. She was tall, well over six feet in her rain-sodden sandals, and had wrinkled, big-boned features. Her almost skeletal physique was draped in a washed-out dress of Fortuny fabric that must once have been of spectacular richness and colour, gathered at the breast by a massive cameo broach of classical design. She had an air of unkempt elegance and mournful distraction about her that just stopped her being ridiculous.
Her voice had the deep rasp of a longtime smoker as she invited me in.
The room into which she led me was obviously her quarters. It was all Persian rugs, brocade throws, massive mirrors with carved frames, and a profusion of stone and metal gods and goddesses looming through clouds of incense. It took me back at once to many rooms in which I had sat and smoked dope in the late 1960s.
There must have been a big bird either trapped, or given free rein in that huge room, because something was flapping and scraping up in a dark corner.
Katarina Garside perched somewhat precariously on a club fender in front of a roaring fire. The surround was marble, with bearded caryatids that had once been painted in bright colours, but were now faded and peeling into a state of corpse-like decay. Steam was already rising from her saturated skirts as she gestured me to sit before her. As she did, a quite massive cat appeared out of the darkness and draped itself around her shoulders, like a sentient fur stole.
Fronting the fire was a high-backed settle that proved upright and uncomfortable to the point of torture, suitable only for awaiting a judicial sentence. It was as I sat down that I saw for the first time the huge charcoal drawing that hung above the fireplace.
At first glance, it might have been a depiction of a woman asleep at full-length in a dark room. On closer examination, I could make out a host of pulpy, worm-like creatures looking on. The “cover” under which the sleeper lay was a living mass so wonderfully drawn that it seemed to coil and undulate over the body; its upper part, which reared over the woman’s face, was a mad combination of gigantic mantis and decaying crustacean, its claws, or tendrils, locked upon her flesh. She was surrounded by what might have been guttering, half-melted candles, or ejaculating members half-gone in rottenness.
The smothering assailant was horribly boneless, disgusting, but the depiction was clearly not one of unwelcome assault. The features of the woman were subtly distorted, but in a way that suggested ecstasy rather t
han pain or fear. It was in the same style, and had the same unpleasantly attractive effect, as The Chapel of Infernal Devotion.
I recognised the face of the reclining figure as a younger version of the woman perched on the fender. I also realised with a shock who Katarina Garside was, or more accurately, who she had once been.
Grainy photographs in magazines and music papers; gauze-filtered images flushed with psychedelic colours on album sleeves: Katarina Garside had once been that “lethal muse of poets”, Eva Malas.
Whether or not people of a certain age recognised the name was to me the acid test of just how truly “underground” their musical tastes had once been. To respond positively was to identify oneself as an initiate, a celebrant of deep mysteries; an explorer in recondite musical realms.
Many were the thyrsus bearers, but few were the bacchoi.
I still loved her songs, like incalculably ancient funeral chants intoned from the deck of some black barge plying strange waters; cries of despair echoing repetitiously through corridors of freezing stone, usually accompanied by a range of instruments from sources obscure even by the experimental standards of the day, such as the sordun, darbuka, shawm, conch shell, Dong Chen, sackbut, shakuhachi, swaramandal, shofar and rackett.
I had always thought that if Ligeia or Madeline Usher played and sang, the result would have sounded like Eva Malas. Looking at the woman perched on the fender, it struck me that she had finally come to resemble what she had always sounded like: the emaciated doppelgänger of some once-grand creature, haunting its own house while yet alive.
In those psychedelic images on the gatefold LP sleeves, it had not been easy to form a clear idea of her appearance. She was usually in hieratic postures, swathed in layers of robes and fantastic headgear like a Shinto priest, sometimes even riding camels, or restive stallions, in desert locations. Even in her prime we had not thought her beautiful; interesting in a dangerous way, perhaps. I had always assumed she was foreign, not just because of her name, and her curious pronunciation, but because of her slanting eyes, high cheekbones and odd complexion. The set of her mouth had always suggested callous indifference, if not cruelty.
Suddenly the incredible exterior of the house made perfect sense. Drawing a line through Jimmy Page with his Gothic Revival pad in London, and his purchase of Crowley’s Boleskine House on the banks of Loch Ness, nothing seemed more understandable to me than that Eva Malas should have chosen to “get it together in the country” in such a crumbling palace bedecked with gods and monsters.
I was exploding with questions inspired by a life of singular strangeness. Above all, I wanted to ask her whether any recordings existed of ‘Altar-wise by Owl Light’, the barely publicised live performance of poems by Dylan Thomas to music by Eva and John Cale—an occasion evidently so redolent of Celtic twilight that a journalist from Melody Maker had risen to new heights of combined racial and musical bigotry by dismissing it as the “Eistedfodd of the Spheres”.
Strangely, some instinct told me not to mention the fact that I recognised her. Possibly it was that dignified reserve that made me reluctant to appear crass. Instead, I pointed out the picture and said it was a wonderful example of a Youlden.
She replied flatly, “Of course it is. What else could it be?”
I was to grow all too familiar with that brusque, dismissive tone, so devoid of sensitivity to the feelings of others.
When I asked her the title of the picture, she stared deep into the fire, one bony hand caressing the cat, and muttered.
“My husband always called it The Sperm of the World, but its proper title is The Marriage Beneath the Shade.”
So my stay did not begin particularly auspiciously, and it got worse before it got better. It soon emerged that she had only invited me because she hoped to get hold of the Chapel drawing, and my admission that it was now inaccessible made her very angry. I pointed out that I had not claimed anything to the contrary, which she was unable to deny.
It was when I mentioned the buyer was Bentliff that she exploded with rage, sending the cat leaping to the floor.
Her anger was a truly frightening experience. She was a towering figure, and her great mop of hair made her look bigger still. She clawed the air and poured a stream of invective mingled with unrecognisable words, or more accurately snarling, hissing sounds that bordered on the animalistic. I had never seen anyone so completely consumed with fury. As I cowered there, fearing that my visit was over before it had begun, I made out the accusation that I had come on Bentliff’s behalf. I lost no time in assuring her that there was no love lost between me and the man.
She crouched over me like a great bedraggled bird of prey.
“Are you telling me you didn’t know that he used to be my husband?”
I was stunned. For a second all I could think was, what has Rupert got me into?
It was probably my obvious dismay that eventually convinced her I was not some spy in the war that was apparently still raging between the estranged couple. My sincere dislike of Bentliff, very enthusiastically expressed, did no harm either. The fool had evidently been trying to get his hands on the collection for years, and had been held at bay only by the legally watertight nature of Youlden’s will.
In the end, my obvious hatred of Bentliff and my unfeigned admiration for Youlden calmed things, and I was actually allowed to enter the “Holy of Holies”, where the collection was kept.
The massive book-lined room—once Bentliff’s library, I would guess, and only later appropriated as a studio by Youlden—had clearly been left exactly as it had been on the day the artist disappeared. His pipe was still sitting in an ashtray, and his spectacles and an expensive-looking fountain pen lay on a page of half-finished notes. There were substantial spaces around the shelves, probably where Bentliff’s books had been removed, but there were still many hundreds of old volumes. A massive tome on Welsh folklore on a lectern, entitled Untrodden Tracks and Faery Paths, by Professor Edward Poole, was interleaved with hundreds of scraps of paper, the pages annotated so densely in fountain pen—”sedgy with citations” in fact—that the text looked besieged. Opposite the title page he had written an encouraging inscription beloved of Talmudic scholars: Delve into it, and continue to delve into it, for everything is in it.
Books on similar lines lay all around. The Testimony of Tradition by David MacRitchie, A Relation of Apparitions and of Spirits in the Ancient Realm of Gwent by Professor John Howell and so on were stacked close by, along with an odder choice, a much-thumbed paperback of the Lumen de lumine of Thomas Vaughan.
Some of his notes reflected the old argument whether the local belief in the Twlydd Teg was based on memory of an aboriginal race or a distorted belief in fallen angels. Another, not in Youlden’s hand, was more cryptic:
Brute Stone and spell—do not go near the tunnels of Saksaksalim—one who quivers in a horrible manner—a shib show?—On every tumulus the totems of Dagdagiel—can the Jeelo use them, as in sacrament of the hollow, to raise the pyramid of Shaliku?—Reversion to Primal Slime—power over bodily form—Proteus as a function of Pan?
In an open copy of Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries I found underlined some words relating to chants, magic sounds and the magician’s will that must have resonated strongly with the art of Eva Malas.
There was even a letter from Doctor Anne Ross comparing the nature of Celtic stone heads in their possession, referring to the têtes coupées from Entremont, and discussing long, thin figurines, all of a strikingly similar appearance, from as far afield as Argyllshire, County Cavan, Teigngrace in Devon and Montbuoy in France.
I was both surprised and impressed by the seeming extent and seriousness of Youlden’s researches. They were frankly excessive for a mere book illustrator, but they might well constitute a separate, if related, obsession.
The collection proved to be immensely impressive. There were dozens of large-scale paintings, many hundreds of drawings, as well as diaries and personal effects, inclu
ding many old photographs of Katarina and Youlden. She looked, of course, much younger than him. He must have been well past middle-age by then, but Nicola Ottoway’s panting description of him had not been entirely unjustified. He still had the look, and the casual self-assurance, of an ageing film star—reminiscent, perhaps, of the Conrad Veidt of The Spy in Black.
Most stunning of all the pictures were a number of rough charcoal sketches, obviously drawn very quickly, of creatures from Celtic faery lore. In a stroke of great originality, Youlden had placed them in recognisable surroundings, such as the house and grounds. One, inscribed The Dol’s House, was apparently a formal architectural study of Plas Gwyllion, but the view through the windows revealed the interior to be full of decayed flora and fauna of fantastic size.
Over the following days I settled into a routine, spending most of my time in the library, and seeing little of Katarina. My nights were uncomfortable, my days hardly better. The only form of heating were wood fires, and then only in any room currently occupied by Katarina. Plas Gwyllion did have electricity, but either the wiring was faulty, or the local supply was erratic, because I spent an inordinate amount of time in candlelight, which was atmospheric, but inconvenient. The huge cat, named “Cath Paluc”, often visited me, sometimes to try and lay on whatever I was looking at, sometimes to annexe my lap for heat, until my legs went numb.
My attention was, of course, mainly focussed on the works of Youlden, but there were occasional distractions, such as the day I found a truly remarkable bundle of letters, tied up with red string, sent to Katarina from the Surrealist poet and author Ithell Colquhoun. One sought her advice on such matters as the obsessive effect of the word “Ishakshar” in The House of Souls, and thanking her for the warning concerning the subject of the Sime drawing on the binding. Others dealt variously with automatism as a means to open the way to unseen worlds, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, the meaning of the “Green Diamond” in the ancient wisdom of the Silures, something called The Children of the Mantic Stain, and whether Katarina knew that Plas Gwyllion stood upon a mundane chakra of great telluric power.
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