The Ka of Gifford Hillary

by Dennis Wheatley

  With that unhappy surmise in mind my thoughts again became vague and wandering until they ceased to flow. But, as a result of my past indifference of my family’s welfare, before the night was out I was to suffer still deeper shame.

  * * * *

  I was roused by the opening of the door, and Christobel’s voice saying: ‘Stay where you are for a minute, while I put on the fire.’

  By the light from the hall-way she crossed the room, switched on the three bars of the electric fire, and when it was glowing fully called softly over her shoulder: ‘You can come in now. This will give enough light to save you from tripping over anything.’

  Closing the door behind him a man came into the room—presumably Archie. He was considerably older than I should have expected, and much nearer to my age than to hers. As he took off his overcoat I saw that he was wearing a dinner jacket; so it looked as though Christobel’s story to Harold that she was going to a cinema was because she did not trust him and wished for reasons of her own to mislead her mother, and that actually she had gone straight up to the West End to dance and sup. It had struck me that she looked very smartly turned out for the pictures and possibly a visit to some local night-spot afterwards. A glance at the clock showed me that it was a quarter to four, and no local place would have kept open till near that hour.

  Archie was a tallish man, rather red in the face and with thinning hair. Christobel seemed to be carrying her drink pretty well but it was obvious that he had knocked back quite a bit more than was good for him and, slurring his words a little, he said rather peevishly:

  ‘I do wish you’d have let me take you to … to the flat.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she replied with a shake of her head. ‘Not at this time of night, and have the porter recognise me coming out. Besides, I loathe having to get up and dress again.’

  He gave an anxious glance at the ceiling. ‘You’re quite sure no one’ll hear us?’

  ‘No, darling, not a chance of it.’ She threw herself down on the chesterfield at full length, and added: ‘Even if Mother is awake, without her hearing aid she is as deaf as a post; and my kid brother is right at the top of the house.’

  She had not taken her feet from the floor; so as she lay there invitingly her knees were on a level with her chin. Swaying slightly he stood looking down on her with an appreciative leer.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  At that, he plumped down beside her, took her in his arms and gave her a long rich kiss. But after a moment she pushed him away and asked:

  ‘How about that hat in Josette’s window that you were going to buy me?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he protested. ‘It’s only … only the other day I paid your hairdresser’s bill for you.’

  ‘I know that.’ She gave him a quick kiss on the nose. ‘But you like me to dress well, and it’s over a fortnight since you gave me a present. Please don’t be a meanie.’

  Sitting up he got out his pocket book and with fumbling fingers extracted some pound notes. ‘Here you are, then. It was a fiver, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Thank you, my poppet.’ Taking the notes she performed the age-old gesture of pulling up her skirt and stuffing them into the top of her stocking.

  Again he bent over her, then said in a tone that implied no insult: ‘You know the truth is that you’re a … a damned expensive gol … gold-digging little bitch.’

  ‘Am I?’ she laughed up at him. ‘Anyway you’ve no cause to complain. You know that I always give you jolly good value for your money.’

  I slunk away then, out through the passage and the front door to the street. It was the final humiliation, and that Harold should have foreseen the possibility of just such a situation added to its bitterness. Through my neglect of her, I had been brought to witness my daughter in the act of prostituting herself to a drunken man.

  6

  Sunday 11th September

  Heedless of where I was going, I moved through a few silent residential streets instinctively taking a downhill direction and some ten minutes later arrived at the north bank of the Thames. Turning right, I made my way along the embankment until I reached Putney Bridge. There I remained for well over an hour, again contemplating my strange and unhappy condition.

  Johnny and James Campbell had been perfectly right in their assessment of my attitude to suicide. In spite of Bill Wiltshire’s view, that in certain circumstances it was the decent thing to do, I don’t think I could ever have brought myself to take my own life; yet, so miserable was I from the experiences of the past night that, had I still been alive, I really believe I would seriously have considered throwing myself off the bridge into the river. But as I was already dead, to do so offered no escape from the thoughts that tormented me.

  The sky over London is never dark, but gradually it lightened to the east until the street lamps were dimmed and the outline of Fulham Palace became clear in a new day. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go; but I decided that I must make an effort to rouse myself from the slough of despondency into which I had fallen, and that the best way to do so would be to make use of my extraordinary asset of invisibility. By it I could enter houses unseen and listen to the most intimate conversations. That at least offered a prospect of taking my mind off my own worries.

  Crossing the bridge I proceeded towards London. As it was a Sunday morning the streets were still deserted, except for an occasional night-hawk taxi crawling home and a few groups of young people on bicycles making an early start for a day in the country.

  The district that I entered was a mean and shabby one. The main street was lined with poor shops and the gutters were littered with refuse from rows of stalls that had stood there for a Saturday market. In the side turning solid rows of low, flat-topped, mid-Victorian houses faced one another. Each had a pillared portico, and at one time they had no doubt been small family residences for respectable head clerks, small tradesmen and widows with modest incomes; but they had fallen into a sad state of destitution and were now either tenements or cheap lodging houses.

  I entered several and their interiors only added to my depression, yet somehow I felt forced to continue my investigations. Behind the grubby curtains I found a squalor which I had hardly realised existed. Few of the families had more than two rooms and sometimes numbered as many as six people. The greater part of them were still asleep; the grownups huddled under dirty coverlets in narrow beds, and often in the same room an old woman or children stretched out on palliasses on the floor. Among them were quite a number of negroes and others of obviously foreign origin.

  In recent times many of the worst slums in the old East End have been demolished and replaced by big blocks of modern workers’ flats; so a large part of the very poor have established new slum areas in Notting Hill and down there in Walham Green. Consequently, I knew that I was looking at what is called the ‘submerged tenth’—the ne’er-do-wells, the petty crooks and near down-and-outs—that form a social sore in every great city, and for which no Government, given the best will in the world, can do very much. But all the same I was appalled by what I saw.

  That must not be taken to imply that I became a sudden convert to Socialism. It is my firm conviction that although the honest Socialists—and there are many of them—have as their ideal the redistribution of wealth so that poverty shall be eliminated, the means by which they would attempt to do so are hopelessly impracticable. The results of increasing taxation on the better-off and the restriction of private enterprise could lead only to a general reduction of the standard of living over the whole country, and, eventually, to wide-spread unemployment. As has already been shown by a Labour Government, the additional revenue obtained from increased taxation does not go to bettering the lot of the very poor, but is squandered in paying the vast non-productive bureaucracy necessary to administer nationalised industries and maintain controls. Moreover as the prosperity of the country decreased so too would the amount received from taxes, with the final resu
lt that the Government itself would face bankruptcy, and be compelled to stop the payment of pensions, food subsidies, health benefits and all the other measures of social security which the people now enjoy as citizens of the Welfare State.

  No, I was certainly not converted to Socialism; but there came into my mind the saying of Christ that: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ And I had been a rich man.

  Again I wondered if I was in Purgatory, and that, just as I had been shown the results of my selfishness towards my family, so I had now been directed here in order that I might see the appalling conditions in which many of my fellow human beings had been living while I, without giving them or their like a thought, must often have driven past these very houses in my big car, on my way into London and to a lunch, the price of which would have fed a whole family for a week.

  I was jerked out of this fresh cause for heart-searching by a new and rather diverting experience. It was in a house crowded with negroes. In one carpetless room on the second floor, furnished only with a truckle bed, a single cupboard, a wash-stand and two chairs, a dusky couple had already woken. The woman, a beautifully healthy young animal clad only in an incredibly filthy kimono which she had left hanging open in front, was cooking up some mess on a gas ring; the man was sitting propped up in bed plucking chords from a homemade guitar and softly crooning a cheerful little ditty. I had entered by the window and was comforting myself somewhat with the thought that even the direst poverty could not prevent young people getting some joy out of life, when he glanced in my direction.

  Suddenly his eyes began to roll in terror. Letting out a blood-curdling yell, he leapt from his bed, dashed for the door, wrenched it open and fled shouting downstairs. The only possible explanation was that he had seen me as a ghost, and it was interesting to know that physically sensitive human beings could do so as well as animals. But, more important at the moment, the sight of the whites of his eyes rolling ludicrously in his coal-black face, then of his flailing legs beneath the flying tail of his shirt as he bolted for the door, were just the things needed to restore my sense of humour.

  Deciding that I had done quite enough slumming, I moved north-eastward at a walking pace, heading roughly in the direction of Hyde Park; but the mean streets seemed endless and by the time I reached the Queen’s Gate area there were many more people about. Quite a few were entering a Church for early service, the Sunday papers were being delivered, and every few minutes I noticed the curtains of a window being drawn back.

  The rows of one-time private mansions in the pleasant tree-lined streets and squares of this district had also been transformed, but in their case into private hotels and spacious apartments having anything from five to ten rooms. Here and there, too, whole rows had been demolished to make way for big blocks of luxury flats.

  Like Don Cleofas in Le Sage’s tale, after he had rescued the demon Asmodeus from imprisonment in a bottle by a sorcerer, roofs were no longer a shield to the privacy of any home I chose to examine, and during the next few hours I entered fifty or more, leaving each with a different emotion. There is no truer saying than that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives’, and, applicable as it was to myself and the slums I had visited that morning, it also proved far more so than I would ever have suspected about these people many of whom were of my own social standing.

  Most of them, of course, were behaving quite normally, but on average they seemed no happier than the poor wretches who had to struggle for existence some three miles to the south-west in Walham Green. A pair of, presumably, newly-weds, whom I surprised in an upper maisonnette, balanced out the cheerful negro couple whose morning I had inadvertently spoilt; but I was also the invisible witness of several grim little scenes.

  In one flat I saw a youngish night porter who had just come off duty slap and jeer at a middle-aged woman who was paying him to make love to her. In another, over breakfast, a despotic-looking uncle was deriving sadistic enjoyment from outlining the penalties he meant to inflict upon his school-boy nephew if the youngster did not get a better report at the end of the term which was due to start the following week. In a third a girl of about twenty-six, who was dressing in the bedroom of a white-haired man with the benign expression of a bishop, said to him. ‘If you want me to spend another night with you, you’ll have to make it better worth my while. Fifteen quid isn’t good enough for letting you use me as a human pincushion.’ In a fourth, again over breakfast a hard-faced mother was laying the law down to her grown-up son, and telling him that unless he broke off his engagement she would cut off his allowance.

  I saw a pretty girl take a shot of dope, and a young man beating himself with a dog-whip in front of a crucifix. A well-known barrister, whom I happened to know by sight, was refusing his wife’s plea to dissociate himself from a group of fraudulent company promoters because he was able to avoid paying income tax on the big fees they were handing him in cash; while another man was saying to his wife that next time he went up to Manchester and his boss wanted her to sleep with him she had better let him, as that might lead to promotion; whereas her continued refusal might mean the sack, and where then would they find the money to keep their boys at an expensive prep school.

  The worst thing I saw was a nurse torturing a small boy. She was making him stand in a steaming bath that was too hot for him. As he moaned and whimpered, lifting first one foot then the other, and struggled to get out, she kept on pushing him back, and saying: ‘That’ll teach you to tell tales to your mother about me speaking to gentlemen in the Park. Do it again, you spoiled little brat, and I’ll push you under head and all. Then it won’t be you who comes into your snooty Lord-papa’s title.’

  I would have given anything to be able to intervene, but I was incapable even of acting as a cooling draught of air which might have lowered by a fraction the temperature of the hot water in which the poor child was being forced to stand.

  Another half dozen random visits revealed only people snoozing or reading in bed; couples mildly bickering or cheerfully making plans for the day. Out of my half-hundred rather reprehensible snoopings into the lives of the better off, I had found nothing really to intrigue, and quite a lot to disgust, me. Although I could no longer talk to anyone, I felt a sudden craving for the companionship of someone that I knew and cared about. My thoughts turned to Johnny; so I set off for Westminster.

  It was eleven o’clock by the time I arrived at the great block of Government offices that stretch from Whitehall to St. James’s Park, and not only house several Ministries but also accommodate such departments as those of the Lord Privy Seal and Ministers without Portfolio. During the war the offices of the War Cabinet had also been situated in it, and it was no secret that a range of rooms on the ground floor overlooking the park had been converted into a flat in which Sir Winston Churchill lived for the greater part of the conflict. It was far less vulnerable to bombing than the old Georgian residence No. 10 Downing Street; and living there had enabled him to send, with a minimum of delay, for any of his Planning Staff, as it had occupied the basement beneath the flat.

  Johnny had told me that the Joint Planners no longer devilled like troglodytes in the basement, but that it had been retained more or less in its war-time state and that little parties of distinguished visitors from overseas were now frequently taken round it. Assuming that the offices of the Planners would not have been moved very far I decided to begin my search for Johnny in the vicinity of the old ones, and as I entered the spacious hall I found that one of these parties had just arrived.

  It consisted of four Americans and a Canadian couple. They were being received by the elderly custodian, and as he was examining their credentials I decided that it would be interesting to join them.

  Leading the way down two flights of stone stairs, the old gentleman said in a soft voice: ‘We are now about to enter the famous fortress basement from which the High Direction of the war
was conducted. In addition to the four storeys of stone and steel building above it, a four-feet deep layer of concrete was inserted between it and Sir Winston’s flat and the offices of his secretaries on the ground floor. It was guarded by a special company of armed Home Guards who examined all passes, sentries supplied by the Brigade of Guards were posted on its entrances, and it had an internal garrison of Royal Marines, which also acted as servants to the Officers of the Joint Planning Staff who worked here under General Lord Ismay.

  ‘As well as being bomb-proof it was gas-proof, air-conditioned, had its own electric light plant and was provisioned to withstand a siege. In it was the terminal of the Atlantic Telephone on which the Prime Minister had all his talks with President Roosevelt. Its telephone system was connected by deep-laid lines to all the principal cities and Command Headquarters of the Kingdom; so that, in the event of invasion, had every telephone exchange in London been knocked out by bombs operations could still have been conducted from here and from G.H.Q. Home Forces, which occupied a similarly-fortified basement adjacent to this one. If the Germans had decided to sacrifice an Airborne Division by dropping it on Whitehall with the object of attempting to destroy the nerve centres of the Government, this underground fortress would have closed up like a clam, with the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Organisation inside it, and they could have continued to direct the war overseas without the least apprehension, while the enemy parachutists were being mopped up by the troops under the command of G.O.C. London District.’