“Are you properly disgusted, Sophie?” Carl asked, holding out an empty glass.
We were standing before a sculpture of a gargoyle entangled with a vaguely feminine figure with plaster-white limbs and a top dressing of fresh livers. It was not clear if the thing was devouring her or coupling with her, or both. Sheep’s eyeballs were positioned next to the scene, as though they had popped out of her head in horror. The splashes of blood would ruin the plaster: it was all intended to be ephemeral, fleeting stuff. I did not see how Herbert hoped to sell any of it.
I filled Carl’s glass and took a minute to assess the gory figure with its malformed limbs and hunched body. The collection was derivative, a patchwork of Gothic themes stitched together. Herbert’s attempt at artistic patter would not have passed muster with a second-rate Victorian showman luring crowds to his collection of freaks. There was something haunting about some of the tableaux, a slight frisson of real horror, but the effect was no more than the echo of a bad dream.
“I’m not familiar with modern art, but he has a notion of horror,” said Chuck, who seemed rather taken with it. He was tall, slim, and rather bookish. He had no eye, and like all Americans he was too easily impressed by grand, empty gestures.
“It has a certain crude éclat,” I said. “But…no. Ten years ago, before Dada, Herbert might have been on to something. Now the art schools turn out this sort of thing by the yard.”
“I know where he got those figures from,” said Julian, snapping his fingers suddenly. “I knew he’d stolen the idea from somewhere. And not very far away.”
“What do you mean, stolen?” asked Carl.
“The funny gargoyles on Virgo Fidelis convent,” said Julian. “Don’t you think it’s the spit and image of those? I was admiring them by moonlight the other evening.”
He said this with the air of one who often walks by moonlight to enjoy the ambience, rather than because he has drunkenly missed the last bus. He was disappointed when neither of us immediately agreed with him, and tossed his hair in theatrical irritation. Julian was not necessarily homosexual, I had learned, but the pose kept him at the centre of attention. It also allowed him to slip past women’s defences. Most of the girls of our set were wise to him now—but wise after the event.
“Well, I think it’s a blatant theft, and I’ll tell him so,” said Julian, stalking off.
“It’s very different from his previous stuff,” said Carl. “He has a new muse, a girl called Marguerite. I can’t think what she’s like to inspire this.”
“Disgusting, I suppose,” said Claudia. “Isn’t she here?”
“No,” said Carl. “He keeps her hidden away, his mysterious woman.”
“Married, probably,” I surmised. “Can’t be seen with him.”
As it turned out, I was almost right.
The evening was a short one. It was much too cold and there was not enough wine to keep the guests there for long. A few of us helped clear up—no more than rounding up the empty bottles and glasses—before fleeing in the direction of the welcome fire in the Conquering Hero. I recall looking round just as I was leaving and taking a last look at the sculptures as the lights were turned off one by one. They seemed infinitely more sinister in the dark.
A week later Carl invited everyone over to my house for a jazz party. The kitchen is the biggest room in the old house, and the boys moved the furniture so a trio could play in one corner while the rest of us slouched, sat, or sprawled around. Carl insisted on bringing Chuck, because he was American and had never heard jazz. Chuck was determinedly antiquarian and had come to Europe to escape the modern world. He spent a lot of time in the British Museum.
“Chuck is studying the Dark Arts,” said Julian. “He’s looking for Secret Things.”
I didn’t think anything of this remark, but Chuck shot Julian a look of pure hatred. A trust had been betrayed. For some reason, Chuck had not wanted me to know of his interest in the occult.
Ten miles away in the West End there were real jazz musicians from America, men who had lived in the bayous of Louisiana and learned their music in New Orleans bordellos. That was the jazz we used to go and see with George, touring Dixieland originals, and Daniel and I had our perpetual argument about whether the beauty of jazz lay in the form or lack of it. But real musicians cost real money; here we listened to pale imitations. Very pale ones, boys whose whole lives had been spent under the watery sun of England.
The music moaned and wailed in incessant, winding loops, never quite getting anywhere. The evening seemed to be going on forever, and perhaps it was boredom that caused me to succumb to the lure of hashish-laced cigarettes. I was soon in the land of the lotus-eaters, drifting on clouds of aromatic smoke. The world was a long way away and nothing very much seemed to matter. The jazz rhythms merged into the background, until it seemed to me that I was looking at a wall grown with ivy, each note a leaf and with a hundred different strands running up and down. Around me others were nodding appreciatively, and for once all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I wondered if this was that trance state that all the old religions aspired to, if this was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece.
A couple were swaying to the music, chiaroscuro figures in the smoke and dim light. I envied their free, natural, loose-limbed grace, but envy gave way to pure pleasure in watching them move. The musicians started to play faster, with more energy, feeding off the dancers. This was what Bohemia aspired to, this was why they looked down on stuffy balls with waltzes and foxtrots and musicians in starched shirts. This was the real thing, the ideal, life as it should be lived—or perhaps it was the effect of the hashish.
The couple turned, and as they stepped through a beam of light I saw them. The boy was a stranger, young and handsome, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, and the suggestion of a Rudolph Valentino moustache.
The girl was Daisy.
I gave a small cry but stifled it at once. If this was a dream, I did not want to break the spell and wake up. I wanted to see Daisy again, to feel she was free in the world again, radiating her beauty into it.
After a minute the dancers sat down and I lost sight of them. I breathed again and subsided into my drugged dreams. If my brain had not been so clouded I would have done something, but it was all just too beautiful to disturb. The jazz lapsed back into its endless not-quite-repetitions, and I was drifting softly on a sound that would always remind me of her.
Daisy was, simply, the nicest person you could ever hope to meet. And I don’t, for once, mean that in a sneering way. Her niceness dissolved one’s ability to think badly of her. You rather ignored her for her intellectual failings, but she was in many ways the best of us. She was uncomplicated. Daisy managed to be simple and direct where we were lost in our cerebral convolutions.
Daisy was the little sister I should have had, that everybody should have had. She may not have achieved much in your terms, but she never needed to. She had open-mouthed admiringness, as entirely real and genuine as the adoration of a spaniel that thinks you’re the best and cleverest.
We love people for what we are when we are with them. When I was with her I was brave, I was witty, I was full of worldly wisdom, and I wanted to share it as much as she wanted to lap it up. With Daisy I was my very best self.
Perhaps if Daisy had been plain her mind would have developed more. I don’t know if that would have been a good thing. Daisy was the Uncarved Block of eastern philosophers. She was so beautiful, the slings and arrows of life glanced off her beauty, and the way was smoothed for her. She could enliven any gathering just by being there, like some magic cookery ingredient.
I can only guess the effect she had on men, but for most of them there was an instant halving of I.Q. She was surrounded by a moving circle of men playing the fool, showing off, stumbling over their words, and dropping things. Daisy thought it was all charming and delightful. Poor Daniel: if he had only done something idiotic he might have won her.
George thought she wielded
the greatest power in the world: if he could only harness it, then armies would crumble before him. He did his utmost to charm her with gallantry and flatter what little vanity she had. With her on his arm, doors opened before him. She thought that was wonderful.
“You dreamed she was in a jazz club,” said Dr Hamilton. Obviously I had to tell it as a dream. You do not want your psychiatrist to think you are any madder than you are. “But she was remote from you, and you say she did not see you.”
“I was a bit of a ways back, and she was right in front of the band,” I explained. “In the dark.”
“So you were in the dark, and she was in the light,” he said. “Interesting.”
“Those African masks are quite ugly,” I said to break the silence at last. There were half a dozen of them on the far wall, bizarre wooden things which hardly looked like human faces at all. Dr Hamilton had brought them back after a research trip to Dahomey, he said. He thought they represented archetypal figures from the collective unconscious; I thought they represented bad art.
Freud had classical statuary in his consulting room, which would have been more to my taste. That was a world away in North London.
Today the masks looked particularly threatening. “I wonder if they come from the same part of Africa as jazz music?”
“Did the jazz club suggest anything to you?” he asked. “We’ve talked about this sort of thing before.”
“The womb, obviously,” I said. “A warm, dark, enclosed space where I felt safe. Perhaps I’m identifying Daisy with my younger self.”
“And was the male dancer your father?” asked Dr Hamilton.
Instead of snorting at this ludicrous idea I had to pretend to think about it for a minute. It was always better to go along with his ideas rather than striking out on my own. Doctor knows best.
“More some archetypal male figure,” I suggested. Dr Hamilton did like an archetype. “They made a perfect couple.”
“First your recurrent dreams of Daisy underwater cease after several months,” he said. “And now you start dreaming of her in a new scene. I think we can say we’re making progress. I think we are ready for a new stage in your treatment.”
There was something sinister about the way he said this, a sort of smug, evil purr, that took me aback. And those masks definitely looked more unpleasant today.
“Not hypnosis,” I said. We had talked about hypnosis several times. Dr Hamilton was an enthusiast, but I prefer to keep the innermost recesses of my subconscious locked away, thank you. You never know what might come out. Like you, I keep some dark things in there, things that Dr Hamilton had better not disturb.
“We can talk about it next time,” he said.
Chuck was sitting on a wall outside reading the newspaper, ready to walk me back to my house. Chuck was a perfect lamb, always so polite and well-mannered. He dressed smartly, but his clothes were so determinedly old-fashioned that he looked like a character out of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This air of fancy dress was perfect camouflage among the Bohemians.
It was sweet of him to be waiting for me there. I scented an ulterior motive.
“Shall we walk back through the woods, Miss Sophie?” he suggested, folding the paper up and tucking it under his arm. “It’s the scenic route. Much better than all these suburban houses. Primeval forest will do you good after that head-shrinker.”
“It’s probably not too muddy,” I said. I’d have worn stouter shoes if I had known. “I didn’t know you read newspapers.”
“I don’t usually read anything so recent,” he said with an air of apology. “But I forgot to bring a book with me.”
From my handbag I fished out my copy of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems.
“This is light enough to take anywhere,” I said. “It’s a sort of guidebook to London by one of your fellow Americans, you know.” The joke fell flat. Chuck did not read modern poetry, or anything modern for that matter, as he had told me many times. “Like you, Eliot thinks the modern world is a disaster and we need to revive the—Wait!”
He froze as I grabbed the newspaper from him. A picture had caught my eye, halfway down a column on the front page which proclaimed:
A TRAGIC ACCIDENT.
Young Man Plunges To Death In Norwood Street.
Body Lay Undisturbed on Pavement For Several Hours.
December 5.—on the morning of Monday the 4th, Westow Street was awakened by a distressing event when John Grey, whose postal round includes the street, found the broken body of Mr. Rupert Copeworth on the pavement. Mr. Copeworth had fallen unheard from the window of his third-storey room at Number 50, some time in the small hours of the morning. His body lay unnoticed until the postman made his pre-dawn round. Exactly how Mr. Copeworth came to fall from the narrow window has not been ascertained, but close neighbours say his habits had become irregular in recent weeks …
The local newspaper devoted a column on the front page to this death, and there was a grainy photograph with it, a graduation picture of a youth with high cheekbones. I knew him at once, even without the moustache. It was the man I had seen dancing at the jazz party.
I read on. The article hinted that a dissolute lifestyle had brought about his death, that his lapse into loose living and dubious friendships was at the heart of it. Music was mentioned more than once in disparaging terms. Evidently he had played it at all hours on the gramophone.
They saved the best to last.
“There was a look of stark terror on his face that will be with me until my dying day,” the paper quoted the postman as saying. “They say a falling man is dead before he hits the ground, and I truly believe he was.”
“That’s the dancing man from the jazz party,” I said, showing it to Chuck. It was definitely him. Unless, of course, my memory was playing tricks, or some other part of my brain was misfiring. Up till now I never had any doubt in my own sanity beneath the layers of misery, alcohol, and deliberate bloody-minded misbehaviour. But now I doubted.
“Could be,” he said, but without any enthusiasm. “I noticed her, but not him.”
“What was she like?”
“Very pretty. Small and blonde, about twenty—one of your perfect English roses. She had on a blue dress, satin or something, and one of those feathery items in her hair—a fascinator, you call it. And she had a twinkle in her eye: you could see she really enjoyed dancing. I didn’t really pay much attention to the guy she was with.”
I didn’t think any other man had noticed her partner either. It did sound like Daisy, though, or her twin…Or a thousand other girls in London.
I tore out the story, folded it into a bookmark for The Waste Land, and handed the paper back to Chuck.
He took my arm like a gentleman, and we went up the long path that leads up through Sydenham Woods. The bare winter trees towered over the path. It was muddy and I trod with care, leaving deep imprints behind me. For some reason the trees made me uncomfortable, as though they were strangers eavesdropping on us.
“This is what I came here for,” he said. We stopped to look up into the high branches of a particularly splendid oak. “I love these big oak trees. When I came to London I thought Norwood must be all forest. Just as I thought London would be like a mediaeval city.”
“I hope you’re not too disappointed,” I said.
“In Providence, my hometown, there are entire streets of buildings three centuries old, but your Old London Town is all plate glass and streetcars and automobiles. Out here in Norwood, though—
“The mystic grove, by Druid wraiths possess’d,
The flow’ring fields, with fairy-castles blest:
And the old manor-house, sedate and dark,
Set in the shadows of the wooded park…”
“I’m afraid they cut down most of the trees for charcoal and built sweet little houses,” I said. “Not many Druid wraiths left.”
“The Druids abide,” he said. “They hanged their victims on these very trees.” He looked into the skeletal branc
hes with approval. “Can you believe it?”
“That was Tacitus writing anti-British propaganda,” I said.
Chuck shook his head with the air of a man who knows better. “True religion always requires human lives. The Druids practised human sacrifice and communicated with the old Gods. And their practices lived on in the secret witch-cults after them, right up to today—right up to Madame Blavatsky, your local witch here. She’s got a few smart ideas.”
“Theosophy is so passé,” I said, walking on. It was an odd coincidence that he should mention Blavatsky, who appears as a character in The Waste Land. “England has embraced the modern world. Providence sounds rather Olde Worlde.”
“Carl said your grandmother was a witch.”
“Not at all,” I said. “My family said she was a witch, but only because she was a girl from a poor family who snared a rich young man. The only magic was the natural result of mixing a lusty young man with a fertile young woman.”
Chuck coughed with embarrassment at my earthiness. Men are such delicate things when it comes to reproduction.
“And luckily for her, he was not enough of a villain to deny everything, so he was forced to marry her. But the family badgered her about witchcraft for years until she gave up and died of scarlet fever.”
“My ancestors were wizards.” There was pride, defiance even, in his voice. “One of them only just escaped from Salem. That’s why I came here. There’s more in magick than your modern world wants to believe, and I mean to prove it. Paracelsus says you can burn up a chicken and then restore it to life from the ashes.”
“No doubt a marvellous party trick,” I said.
“But you see, it’s just chemistry, it’s nothing to do with superstition, and it’s not blasphemous.”
Leaves squished underfoot and we wended our way uphill.
“Still quite dangerous.”
“Power is only dangerous to the foolish,” he said. “Before you summon anything, you have to know how to dismiss it, the right words and gestures and symbols. That’s why I’ve been studying at the British Museum.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 36