Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  ‘I work full time for I.P.H.,’ he said.

  I asked him what this entailed.

  ‘Working for I.P.H. is a full time job. I.P.H. is an international organisation with centres throughout the world. We work all the time for the betterment of humanity.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘By everywhere striving to improve the Psychic Health of individuals and communities.’

  Further questions met with equally bland and evasive responses. I scrutinised Hans’s smooth, smiling face to see if I could tell whether he was naturally obtuse, or being deliberately vague. I even thought of asking him, but I didn’t.

  We travelled for a while in silence along clean Swiss roads in clean Swiss sunshine. The lake of Geneva was nearly always in sight, indigo mountains towering over it. As we approached Montreux Hans asked me if I knew King Kyril well. I said evasively that I knew his daughter better.

  ‘You work as his secretary?’ Hans asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Kyril is a great guy,’ said Hans. ‘We all love him. Mike has a very special place in his heart for Kyril.’

  ‘Who is Mike?’ I asked. Hans’s hitherto impassive face registered surprise, but only for a moment.

  ‘Mike heads up our work in the I.P.H. He is just an amazing guy. You will get to meet with Mike, I’m sure. Your mind will be just blown by him, I promise you.’

  It may well have been at this point that a determination, if at all possible, not to ‘meet with Mike’ became fixed in my mind.

  Once we had left Montreux we took a road which wound slowly up the mountainside, the lake below sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. Hans pointed out to me the Castle of Chillon, in the far distance, its toy towers brooding over the water which surrounded them.

  Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls:

  A thousand feet in depth below

  Its massy waters ebb and flow;

  Thus much the fathom-line was sent

  From Chillon’s snow-white battlement.

  I quoted the lines to Hans, not because I thought he might recognise and appreciate them, but to test his reaction. The look he gave me was not, as I had expected, one of blank incomprehension but of something like hostility.

  ‘This is from a poem?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘The Prisoner of Chillon by Lord Byron’

  ‘In I.P.H. there is true freedom. We release from the Prison of the Self.’

  ‘That sounds splendid.’

  ‘It is very splendid. We are working always for true Psychic Health. There is no time with us for poems by old guys.’

  I felt no urge to argue: philistinism is to be hated, not argued with. The car raced along the slopes above Lake Geneva, past pine woods, chalets and pastures where cowbells clanked gently in the milky light. Then we were in the entrance drive to the St Germain Palace Hotel between a mountainside and the great shadow of the hotel’s bulk.

  Hans leapt out of the car and insisted on carrying my bags into the entrance hall of the hotel. I saw him talking rapidly in German to the receptionist. I caught only a few words, one of which, I think, was ‘stranger’ and the other ‘ignorant’. Hans turned to me.

  ‘We have assigned to you a small suite as desired next to King Kyril whom you will meet at dinner. We have made for you a place. Table number thirty-six. If you require anything please do not hesitate. Trude here will show you your room.’

  Trude, a lumpy young woman in a dirndl skirt, did so. She too insisted on carrying a bag of mine in spite of the embarrassing fact that she only had one arm. She did not speak, but she smiled hard all the way.

  The interior of the St Germain Palace, by contrast with its exterior is neo-Baroque as opposed to neo-Gothic. Ceilings are decorated with plaster scrollwork and dingy but innocuous mythological cloudscapes. On the walls are framed photographs, nearly all of which feature a bald, owlish-looking man in round spectacles. I asked Trude who this was. She seemed surprised to be asked.

  ‘This is Mike who heads up our I.P.H. world-wide movement.’ (The words ‘of course’ were implied.)

  ‘Mike who?’

  ‘Dr Mike Bachman! We hope you will meet with Mike.’

  There was something about Trude’s manner which did not invite further conversation. The room she showed me was pleasant enough, with a balcony overlooking the lake and a small bathroom attached. She told me that I was expected for supper in the dining room at six and that a bell would ring five minutes before the hour to summon me there, then she left. It was a relief to be rid of her company. My eyes could not be kept from straying to the stump of her amputated arm which she swung with unembarrassed pride.

  My room was plain, and there was nothing in it to indicate the presence of the I.P.H. apart from a book on my bedside table. It was a bright blue shiny paperback with THE DYNAMICS OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESS by Dr Mike Bachman in austere white lettering on the front cover. On the back the now familiar image of Dr Bachman stared directly at me through round spectacles.

  Having time on my hands, I thought I had better acquaint myself with the philosophy of the I.P.H., so I opened the blue book. A cursory glance through chapter headings—‘Get to know yourself!’ ‘Obey the Absolutes!’ ‘Work for Community!’ etc.—and some of their contents revealed, apart from an addiction to the exclamatory (always, in my view, an indicator of dullness), a fairly routine recital of the commonplaces to be found in self-help manuals. The very few facts that Dr Mike let fall about himself revealed that he was an American of Swiss ancestry, which, to my prejudiced mind, is an uncongenial combination. When the supper bell roused me from my reading I found myself little better informed about the activities of I.P.H. The only impression I carried with me to the dining room was of a subtle but crushing bias towards uniformity and authoritarianism. On my way I stopped before one of the photographic portraits of Dr Bachman. That owlish countenance which had seemed, at first sight, to be mild and unassuming now began to look a little threatening. The thin lips had a hard, downward curve to them; the nose was the determined beak of a bird of prey, the eyes behind the round spectacles were watchful, almost saurian in their fierce detachment.

  In the vast, echoing dining room lit by panoramic picture-window vistas of mountain, I found table thirty-six and was introduced to King Kyril. Apart from the King and myself there were three others at the table: two very large middle-aged German males in suits and a little, emaciated, bright-eyed old woman with iron-grey hair. She wore a grey knitted woollen dress that reminded one of chain mail and some handmade jewellery of beaten copper. It made her look like a barbaric warrior queen, or possibly a superannuated Valkyrie. The two men, whom I later christened Fafner and Fasolt after the Wagnerian giants, appeared to have appointed themselves (or to have been appointed) as guardians to the King. The woman, who claimed to be one of the I.P.H.’s earliest devotees, introduced herself as the Contessa di Bartori.

  King Kyril was a tall, imposing man in his early seventies who might have been reckoned handsome if his face had not been so marked by sadness and disappointment. I have learned not to read too much into physiognomy, but this was an exception to the rule. The history of his life was etched onto him with heavy, unequivocal lines. Here was a man who had lost a country and failed to find a role.

  His courtesy of manner compensated a little for the gloom of his aspect. He began to ask me about my friendship with Princess Helen in London and appeared pleased by my glowing reports. I noticed that this line of conversation was making Fafner and Fasolt uneasy and they started to try to divert the talk onto more general topics. Their methods were clumsy and once, when Fafner interrupted the King, he was given a stern regal look. Then the Contessa, who seemed to be acting as backstop to the giants, entered the conversation.

  ‘I have met the dear Princess many times in London, of course,’ she purred. ‘Such a charrming person. So devoted to her charities. Now, tell me young man,’ she said, turning to me. ‘You are here, as I understand to assist our friend the King to writ
e his biography?’

  Her eyes were fixed on me with such ferocious concentration that I was in no doubt that she intended to intimidate. I nodded.

  ‘And what approach, may I ask, do you intend to take with this biography of yours?’

  ‘That depends upon His Majesty. I am merely helping him with his autobiography.’

  The Contessa grimaced and closed her eyes, as if to imply that my answer had been feeble and cowardly. Further interrogations from her were forestalled, however, by Fafner who asked me how much I knew about the I.P.H. The Contessa shot him a look of anger and contempt, presumably because she thought his blunderings had robbed her of her prey. I told Fafner cheerfully that I was wholly ignorant of the I.P.H. activities and would be very glad if he could enlighten me. Fafner, assisted by Fasolt, then subjected me to a string of ponderous generalities about what they called ‘The Work’. I noticed that the King was watching our exchanges intently, though how much he understood of it was hard to tell.

  During all this we were being served with food: lentil soup followed by a chicken dish, nourishing and plentiful but bland. I noticed that at most other tables some sort of self-service system was in operation. It was only at a few select tables nearest the window like ours that waiters, or rather I.P.H. volunteers acting as such, were provided.

  Towards the end of the meal, I remember the Contessa once more fixing me with her burning eyes and saying:

  ‘We must arrange that you meet with Mike who is heading up our work. I believe it is very important that you should meet with Mike.’

  ‘Is Mike here?’ I asked, glancing round the room.

  ‘Mike’s work never ceases,’ said the Contessa. ‘He is with us everywhere.’

  III

  The following morning I started to help King Kyril with his autobiography. In many ways he was extremely easy to work with. He was quite willing to place himself in my hands and, up to a point, answer any question I asked him. He was unbothered by tape recorders, or note taking. He never spoke anything except his own mind, but if there were parts of it into which he did not want me to intrude, he told me so directly.

  For example, I wanted to know what he was doing with the I.P.H. but he would say very little. I asked if he had met Mike and gathered that he had been on very close terms with him until about ten years ago but that since Mike’s ‘withdrawal’, he and Mike had only communicated through intermediaries. Further enquiries as to Mike’s withdrawal yielded a little more information. Some ten years ago Mike had for a brief while become ill, since when, though he had apparently made a full recovery, he lived in the St Germain Palace isolated from the majority of his followers, seeing only a chosen few. I expressed surprise that King Kyril had not been one of those chosen.

  ‘I have been assured,’ said the King, ‘that there will come a time when I shall meet again with Mike.’ With those words he made a little cutting gesture with his hand to indicate that this particular topic was no longer to be discussed.

  Despite his general amenability, I encountered two main difficulties in ghosting King Kyril’s autobiography. His Majesty had a touching faith in my expertise: ‘you are a writer,’ he would say, ‘you know best,’ and I began to see what he meant. The King had no feeling whatever for what might interest the ordinary reader. He had a phenomenal memory for facts and dates, but if asked to describe an event or a personage he seemed barely to understand what I meant.

  ‘What was your father like?’ I might say.

  ‘My father King Bogdan, had a moustache, I remember, which was grey, but, in photographs I have seen of him as a young man, it is black. He was born in 1885 and his mother was a Princess of Hesse, connected on her mother’s side with the Dukes of Weimar, and she often wore these little crocheted gloves—’

  ‘But do you have any special memories of him?’

  ‘He had a dog, as I remember, an Elkhound called Rolf who was black with white under the chin. . . .’ And so it went on. The notion that a human being might possess a personality which could be conveyed to the reader was quite alien to him.

  Like nearly all royalty, and most aristocrats, the King had a passion for genealogy and could recite his ancestry back to the Dark Ages, sometimes further. This was not unhelpful, as the intersecting lineages of royal houses have their own fascination and historical value. But he would often say to me something like:

  ‘Ah, Yes. My Great Great Aunt Amélie was of the Archduchy of Saxe-Meiningen-Darmstadt, and her stepmother had been married to the Grand Duke Rudolph—or was it Frederick? I am not sure. We must establish this.’

  Fortunately, he told me, he had an archive of documents and letters back at his apartment in Lausanne which could confirm such details. These, I hoped might contain more colourful information than the facts with which he daily bruised me. But here I came across a second problem. After my first few days with him I began to suggest that we adjourn to Lausanne where I could study his archive, but something always seemed to prevent it.

  Though in the mornings he was largely at my disposal, the afternoons were taken up with what he called ‘meetings’. This at first suited me because it gave me the opportunity to type up and collate the information I had received from him, but these meetings puzzled me. I knew that much of the activity of I.P.H. members was taken up with them, but tactful enquiries yielded no useful information as to their nature or purpose. I could see what the meetings looked like because in fine weather they were sometimes held out of doors on the hotel’s terraces.

  A group of about twenty men and women would sit in a rough circle, all with notepads and pens on their knees. A leader would do much of the speaking, and after he had given his address, there was much industrious note-taking. Frequently he—I saw no female group leaders apart from the Contessa—would solicit contributions from the other members. I noticed also that, when the leader spoke, his words would often be greeted by uproarious laughter, but this would never happen when anyone else said anything. More than that, I could not tell. Several times I tried, on an afternoon walk, to sidle up and hear what was being said, but invariably I would be headed off by an I.P.H. member who happened also to be wandering in the vicinity. It made me wonder if I was being shadowed.

  Several times my ‘shadow’, as I began to call them, was Hans. Once, when my attempt to eavesdrop had almost succeeded, he caught up with me and plucked me sharply by the sleeve.

  ‘This is not for you,’ he said, ‘but you are clearly interested in our meetings. If you like I will try to get you in to one of our beginners’ development seminars.’

  I shrugged to show my indifference.

  ‘I will see what I can do,’ he said.

  The King seemed to regard his meetings as something sacrosanct which took priority over all else, and this meant that for the first week or so, he would not consent to go down into Lausanne to consult the archive. I was aware too that external forces were also lending a hand. Once at lunch he mentioned the possibility of a trip into Lausanne that afternoon. (We sat always at the same table, with the same people.) The Contessa was onto him at once.

  ‘But my dear Kyril,’ she said, ‘we want you to lead a big meeting this afternoon in the main hall on “Strategies for Spiritual Government”. Your contributions to this important topic will be most valuable.’

  ‘That sounds interesting,’ I said, ‘Can I come too?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said the Contessa with a hiss of barely contained rage. ‘This is a meeting at the highest level of our Psychic Development. You are totally inexperienced in such matters! Your presence could be very destructive.’

  The King seemed shocked by this outburst, but he remained silent. The following day we were in his suite when the lunch bell rang, and he said: ‘Let us go this afternoon into Lausanne to look at the archive. I think we will not mention this to the others at lunch.’ As we drove away from the hotel that afternoon, I noticed that Fafner was watching us go. I think King Kyril noticed too, but he said nothing. We drove all the way
to Lausanne in silence.

  The King’s spacious and comfortable apartment was on the third floor of a modern block of flats. I might have said that it was in a respectable part of Lausanne, but this would have been superfluous: I have yet to hear of a part of Lausanne that is not respectable. It was furnished with some taste—his late wife, Kyril told me, had been a ‘connoisseur of antiques’—and, as was to be expected, there were royal portraits everywhere, some dating as far back as the sixteenth century. However, the place did have one unexpected feature. In the two principal rooms of the apartment the wall space not taken up by portraiture was occupied by shelves and glass fronted cabinets stretching from floor to ceiling. In and on them an uncountable number of model tractors was displayed, ranging from tiny toys to ones that could have been sat upon by a small child.

  ‘This is my great collection,’ said the King, with a sweeping gesture, as if he were pointing out his dominions on a map. The heaviness had lifted from his face, and for the time being he was young again. The next few minutes were devoted to a detailed survey of the science of model tractor collecting. Finally he pointed to a gleaming red machine about a foot high, obviously constructed with meticulous attention to detail.

  ‘This, I think, is my favourite. The Massey Fergusson. A fully working model.’

  ‘Have you always been interested in tractors?’

  ‘Model tractors. Yes. It began when I was a boy before the war at our palace in Brzny, I had a special miniature tractor which I would love to ride upon. Alas, it was destroyed or lost in the war, like so much else. It had been a present to me from the United Agricultural Workers of Slavonia. My father, King Bogdan would even let me ride up and down the palace steps on it!’ (Here at last, I thought, was a picturesque detail, suitable for the book.) ‘Now I correspond with model tractor collectors all over the world. In this circle I am regarded as a great authority on the model tractor. A friend of mine has humorously called me “the model tractor king”. It is a good joke, is it not?’