I have no idea how long this went on but I remember the relief I felt when, standing by a window in the corridor of the upper floor, I saw a slight greying in the sky where the mountains across the valley rose up to meet it. I thought that this was the beginning of the end of my ordeal until I heard something move downstairs. It was a sustained creak, and it sounded like a body sitting down in one of the sitting room’s wicker armchairs. I did not fear what I had heard as my sense of fear had been numbed. Poker in one hand, lighted candle in the other, I descended the stairs.
What I saw shocked me, not because it was unexpected, but because my mind had so accurately predicted it. Sitting in the armchair by the stove, and facing me as I came down, was Stanley Seddon.
‘Hello, Cordery,’ he said.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You do know that you are trespassing. This Chalet now belongs to the college. Panter left it to us.’
‘He had no right to! It’s mine!’ said Seddon, almost shouting. Those aggressive eyes were now liquid with rage; the lower lip thrust itself out even further, quivering. ‘He gave it to me.’
‘When?’
Seddon took a moment to recover some composure before replying: ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Why did he give it to you??’
‘Because I treated him.’
‘You are a doctor?’
‘I am a psychiatrist.’
‘A trick cyclist, eh?’
‘Yes, I thought you might be the sort of person to employ that puerile term of abuse.’
I apologised diplomatically and sat down. It would have been quite useless to be angry with him; besides, I had to find out what I could. I asked him what brought him here.
‘I thought I’d drop by. I have been at Cap d’Antibes attending to the King’s sexual problems.’
I said: ‘Don’t try to shock me with that nonsense, Seddon. I know perfectly well that the King is not at Cap d’Antibes; he is at Sandringham.’ Seddon laughed.
‘I am talking about the King, Cordery. The true king, Edward VIII. He may be returning to his rightful place on the throne of England sooner than you think.’
I merely nodded. Seddon was a curious creature: at one moment self-contained and authoritative, the next full of rage, almost a madman. He told me quite steadily that he was the owner of the Chalet, because he had a document signed by Panter himself before witnesses, which transferred the ownership of the Chalet to him. I asked to see it, but he said we would be hearing from his solicitors.
On an impulse I said: ‘I’m not sure we’d want to keep this place anyway.’
He asked why not. I thought he seemed disappointed by this capitulation. I gave him a brief account of what I had heard and seen in the night. He nodded several times and asked me to describe my vision in greater detail. Reluctantly I complied. He nodded again. ‘You have seen the Babe of the Abyss,’ he said.
I merely raised my eyebrows in enquiry. He leaned back in his chair and for a while there was silence. I think both of us were expecting to hear those footsteps above our heads but none came.
‘It was the Summer of ’16 just before the big July offensive on the Somme,’ he said. ‘There were four of us, Maddern, Tommy Johnson, Peters and I, all of us subalterns in the Somerset Light Infantry. Yes, I was an officer then. For a short while, before we went up to the line again, our battalion was billeted at a place called Maulincourt. They put us subalterns in a place that called itself the Château de Maulincourt. It sounds grand, but actually it was a terrible old place, little better than a ruin: damp, great holes in the roof, bats everywhere. The Maulincourt family had abandoned it years before, having fallen on hard times, and I heard that the last Baron de Maulincourt was living in a hovel somewhere in the village. Well, thanks to some sort of administrative lash-up among the brass hats at HQ, we found ourselves stuck in this hole for over a week with no orders, and virtually nothing to do. It was a dump, as I say, but we found that there was one room in the Château which was almost habitable and it was the library, so that was where we passed most of our time. There was an ancient piano on which Tommy Johnson tried to beat out some tune or other. The others drank or played cards, but I explored the books which were still on the shelves and looked as if they hadn’t been touched for generations. Most of them dated from the eighteenth century or before and were in French, or some other foreign language, and many were so riddled with damp and mildew that they were quite useless. But I noticed that there was one locked glass-fronted case that looked as if it contained some comparatively undamaged volumes. In war everyone is a vandal, you know, so I thought nothing of smashing the case open with an iron bar.
‘The books inside were in a remarkable state of preservation, all things considered. They were mostly very old, vellum bound, and some were in manuscript. There was one in particular which attracted my attention because it was handwritten on parchment and contained a number of diagrams, also hand drawn. I noticed that various hands had contributed to it, and that the scribes had signed and dated their entries, the first of them being a Joffroi de Maulincourt in—would you believe it?—the year 1343.
‘It looked like an old family recipe book, which in a curious way it was. It turned out to be a Grimoire, a book of spells. The last entry was dated 1866, which meant there must have been quite a long tradition of sorcery in the family.
‘I don’t know whether you know anything about this sort of thing, Cordery. You probably don’t; you’ve led a sheltered life, but take it from me, most occult writing makes no sense at all, or at any rate takes half a lifetime to decipher. That was the case with nearly all of this stuff which anyway, up to the late seventeenth century, was written in the most appalling Latin. But there were some pages written during the late 1770s by one Etienne Leroyer de Maulincourt which were exquisitely lucid and legible. They were penned in a beautiful eighteenth century copperplate, not crabbed, but flowing and elegant, the sepia ink barely faded. It detailed several ceremonies with clarity and even wit: for instance, Etienne had headed his section of the book Moyen Court de la Magie Luciferienne, no doubt with a mocking nod towards the famous Christian prayer manual known as Le Moyen Court. I suspected that a sly pun on his own family name was also intended.
‘For my own amusement I began to transcribe and translate some of Etienne’s formulae, at which point my chums began to take an interest. Dear God, we must have been bored out of our silly heads, but one night when we had had too much cognac, a barrel of which we had liberated from a local estaminet, we decided to give one of old Etienne’s spells a try.
‘It was a ceremony for summoning a demon called Nybbas. Nybbas is often called “the Babe of the Abyss” because he usually manifests himself in the form of a child about two years old, though somewhat larger than life size. I don’t mean that he really exists in the way that this chair exists, but he is an archetype of the collective unconscious. Read any Jung? No, I thought not. He represents the primacy of what some call evil. He asserts that evil is not somehow the corruption of innocence, but is itself, in its way, innocent. He stands for what theologians call “original sin”, the state into which we are all born. Psychologically he symbolizes a great and unacknowledged truth, that we spring from the womb wicked, or rather, untrammelled by any notion of either good or evil. We are all the children of hellfire and we hide the fact from ourselves at our peril.
‘Well, we performed the little ritual in the library one night, and you will be disappointed to hear that nothing much happened except that the whole place became filled with a thick, disgusting smoke that made mustard gas seem like Attar of Roses by comparison. It seemed like a total failure.
‘Then, the next day, as it happens, our orders came to go up to the line. It was July, and, in the Somme push that followed, Maddern, Tommy Johnson and Peters all bought it. Only I was left, and I soon discovered that that night had left its legacy.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want to go
into it. You wouldn’t understand anyhow. But I will say this. I don’t regret it. Never in a million years because the Babe has given me my life’s work. I had already begun to read Freud and Jung; now my experiences told me of the necessity to awake and acknowledge the demon within us. If we do not admit to its presence we become its prey. I do not want to talk about Panter. I warned him, but he was fool enough to allow himself to become a victim.
‘Everything is in a state of flux. It must be. For there to be Peace, there must be Chaos; for there to be Chaos, there must be Peace. We are entering the age of Chaos and Chaos will purge the world. It is not so much wrong to suppress it as useless. . . .’
He went on and on like this, talking interminable rubbish. Already the sun was beginning to rise and I knew from the voices within me that unless I did something about it I would become a victim too. So I did what I was told because I still had the poker in my hand.
As I beat his head into a pulp, I could distinctly hear above the confusion the obscene, gurgling laughter of a child.
When I had washed the blood out of the wooden floor of the Chalet, I dragged the body outside to the edge of the lawn and buried him in a shallow grave. It was dawn and, as the sun rose, it shone aslant the rough grass, turning its green to gold, and its heavy burden of dew into a crown of diamonds.
VII
Three days later I was sitting next to my wife Margery at the entrance to our beach hut in Frinton, watching my seven-year-old daughter Helen and three-year-old son Maxim running in and out of the sea. Maxim stamped triumphantly at the thin lace border of foamy water on the polished sand. One of his stampings sent up a splash of brine into Helen’s face so that she screamed. Maxim laughed and was duly scolded by Nanny Benton who was supervising their activities at the water’s edge.
‘Charles!’ said Margery suddenly. I turned to look at her. The Frinton weather had been kind for once and had brought out the freckles on her sweet, ordinary face.
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘What were you looking at?’
‘Helen and Maxim, of course! What else?’
‘Well, if I may say so, you were looking at your offspring in a most peculiar way.’ It was the closest thing to reproach that I have ever heard in her voice.
I could not explain to her that, though I was looking at them, I was seeing other things. I saw the splash and spray not of water, but of blood; and in the distance I heard the tramp and slap of tiny, angry marching feet.
BLOODY BILL
I
That afternoon the season of mists reigned over Timbralls, Dutchman’s Farm and Agar’s Plough, Eton playing fields which had once long ago been the fertile domain of Thames Valley farmers. Who Agar had been and who the Dutchman I never knew, but their names still ring in my memory, evoking uneasy nostalgia. It was November. The air had a damp chill in it, and the breath of the cheering spectators on the touchline augmented the fog. Everything, the thick thud of the football, the hoarse cries of the players, even the referee’s whistle, seemed muffled and dim. Mist had sucked colour from the shirts of the players and the mud-churned green of the pitch.
It was the quarter finals, as I remember, of the inter-house championships. On our house notice board a paper had been pinned up which gave details of the time, location and team for that day’s match. Below this the house captain had written in capitals the words: ALL MUST WATCH AND CHEER. It was an injunction which someone of my lowly status in the house could not afford to disobey. I disliked games, but if there was one thing I disliked even more than games, it was being made to watch them.
A group of us, roughly contemporaries, who resented being forced to turn out for this dreary event, were huddled together on the touchline, occasionally stamping up and down on the ground to warm our feet, trying to keep ourselves entertained by making ribald remarks. Eventually our lack of enthusiasm was noted by Hellmore-Henderson, a boy in a junior position of authority in the house with a taste for power and a dull, earnest streak. He strode along the touchline towards us.
‘Take a brace, you spastics!’ he shouted. ‘Cheer! That’s what you’re here for. Don’t you want us to win?’ It was obvious that he was going to stay with us and make our lives a misery. I searched for something to distract him and amuse us.
Further along the touchline stood our house master Mr Naughton (usually known by his initials R.F.N or as ‘My Tutor’) shouting lustily and accompanied by his wife (always known bizarrely as ‘Mrs My Tutor’) who was smiling in her dutiful, bemused way. Some distance from them, and still further from us, an elderly man in a heavy overcoat was standing alone. He was bareheaded and staring at the game intently, his head thrust forward, his heavy jaw jutting out in an aggressive way. It was difficult to tell at that distance and in the mist, but I judged him to be in his seventies.
What struck me immediately about him was his size. He was broad, heavily built and must have been over six feet six in height. The mist and the distance only enhanced the impression that this was a giant of a man. I was intrigued.
‘Who’s that chap over there?’ I asked Hellmore-Henderson.
‘That’s Bloody Bill,’ he replied, as if I ought to have known.
‘Who’s Bloody Bill?’
‘He was a beak here once.’ (‘Beak’ is the Etonian for master.)
‘Why was he called Bloody Bill?’
‘Because he was Bloody Bill, that’s why. Now, come on, stop shirking and cheer.’ Presently Hellmore-Henderson got bored with trying to instil ‘keenness’ (that popular Etonian virtue) into us and moved off to torment others.
‘So that’s Bloody Bill,’ murmured Johnny Scott, one of our group, when Hellmore-Henderson had left.
‘You know about him!’ I said, passionately curious, almost in spite of myself. It turned out that Scott’s father had been at Eton before the war and had told him something of Bloody Bill, who had been a legend. His real name was William Hexham, a beak whose formidable athletic and academic prowess had made everyone believe at the start of his career that he was destined for great things, even the headmastership. He gave every appearance of having been built in the mould of the legendary giants of public school education, like Arnold of Rugby and Thring of Uppingham. When he became a house master, his boys carried away many of the available prizes, both on the playing field and in the classroom, but then rumours began to spread about his harshness, and his use of the cane, excessive even for the inter-war years in which he flourished. He acquired the sobriquet ‘Bloody Bill’, and the name stuck. He eventually had to give up his house ‘because,’ according to Scott, ‘he once nearly killed a boy,’ but he had still been retained by the school as a teacher.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Why the hell wasn’t he sacked?’
Scott looked rather shocked. ‘Oh no. Bloody Bill was a brilliant rowing coach,’ he said, ‘and anyway he was an Old Etonian.’
Not myself having a father who had been at Eton, I was unimpressed. The man was clearly a monster, but this only enhanced my curiosity. Just after half time I sauntered away from my group and towards Bloody Bill, trying to make my movements appear aimless.
He seemed barely to have moved from the position in which I had first seen him. Closer to, the strangeness, the sheer formidableness of the man, was enhanced rather than diminished. His face had a monumental quality as if it had been carved out of a mountainside. Like a Greek statue the nose ran straight from the brow without any indentation at the top; the heavy chin jutted out truculently. His pose was slightly hunched and his hands were thrust deep into his pockets.
His hair was white and still fairly abundant, with that fine, slightly woolly quality which made one suspect that it had once been curly and blonde. His face was grey, which enhanced his resemblance to an archaic stone statue of a god or hero, unrelieved by colour, except for the remarkable eyes. If it is possible for a pale colour to be intense, I would say that they were an intense pale blue, the colour of a cloudless winter sky.
As Bloody Bill c
ontinued to watch the game with extraordinary concentration, I saw that his jaw was working up and down, as if he were chewing or muttering to himself. The steam of his breath came out in great heavy puffs to unite with the chill vapour that surrounded him.
Suddenly he turned and looked at me. It was a look that spoke, and I shall never forget it. It was not so much that it expressed menace, or malevolence, though those elements were undoubtedly present; more significantly, it was a look which said: ‘If you know what is good for you, keep away.’ It warned. I withdrew to a safer distance.
Presently I saw R.F.N, my house master, walk up to him. They exchanged a few words, then glanced in my direction. This made me nervous, so for the rest of the match I devoted myself conscientiously to cheering on my house side which lost that day.
The image of Bloody Bill, the ruined giant in the fog, stayed with me, especially as I began to notice him around Eton. If I had not known who he was, had I not been somehow sensitised to his presence, I might have missed him. As it was, I often saw him, usually in the playing fields, at a distance, alone, motionless and watching some game or activity; and when I noticed him I was frequently invaded by the sense that he had also noticed me. This feeling threatened to develop into a complex, so that whenever I had to go out to a game in the afternoon I would keep my eyes averted from places where I expected to see him. I was fully conscious of my irrationality, but the idea would not leave me, so that it became a kind of personal superstition, like not walking under ladders, or avoiding the colour green.
II
It was about that time that I began to develop a friendship with a boy from another house called Tristram Ronaldson. We had discovered a shared interest in Egyptology and Tristram, though like me only in his second year, had plans to found an Egyptological society. He had the misfortune to be the son of a famous man, the great explorer and naturalist, Sir Jasper Ronaldson. Most people I knew had read his famous book A Stroll in the Arctic. Then there was Ambling in the Himalayas, Amazon Excursions, and others. I had read them myself, and enjoyed them, even if I found that air of phlegmatic nonchalance in the face of appalling danger a little artificial at times. And though the concept of racism did not figure largely in my moral consciousness I was slightly bothered by the tone of amused condescension he evinced towards ‘the natives’. Nevertheless he was a considerable figure whose war exploits had been legendary.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 29