Venus Invades Us was the name of the film, and he played the Venusian Commodore, in charge of the invasion fleet. He answered to the Admiral—bald, beady eyed, thin-lipped, played by Roderick Fox in one of his last roles—who was in a palace of pink cubes back on the planet. They addressed each other via a visual link that was a tall triangle, with a throbbing glow when it was on. Fox’s catchphrase was: ‘they must know our might’, uttered with a clenched brow and plenty of flecks of spit, to which the Commodore invariably replied with a brisk toss of the head and the Venusian salute, a complex flurry of the fingers. Even among all the camp gimmickry, though, there was something about the performance that kept you transfixed with morbid fascination. All the Earthbound scenes, of lovers parted, heroes thwarted, plaster towers toppling, the seas raging, and rays playing over eerie ruins, were only endured as you waited impatiently for the Commodore to reappear, querulous to his subordinates, sneering at the messages from below, which offered treaties, hostages, riches.
The name you might be struggling to remember, by the way, as you think of the bleary credits flashing up on screen and that flaring pose he struck, staring straight to camera in all his blond insolence, is Triton. There was a vogue then for some niche actors to have just one name: Leonardo, Sabrina, Zena. I have no idea who came up with Triton, but it stuck, and he enjoyed using it in private life too. It didn’t seem that odd, not in his circles: hardly anyone used their given name anyway, and some—he might have been one—had reasons not to make theirs known. New life, new name.
So the question a few discerning filmgoers want to know is, why didn’t he appear in any more pictures? Any more, that is, except perhaps one: because there is a sequel he self-directed, much later. Hardly anyone can claim to have seen it, and no-one’s sure a full print exists. But I’ve viewed scenes, both in production and after. I helped him with the script. Not the story: he had all that planned out. Just the dialogue, which was nearly all voice-over, and some smoothing out of the scene-shifting.
What was it? All Against Mars. Ships from across the solar system try to end war by sending love rays onto the red planet. The Venusian Commodore, older and wiser, is now the High Admiral of All, and leads the fleet that bombards Mars—with fragrances, balmy airs, sweet music and ‘karmic balancers’, caressing blue waves. Each of these emanations is shown in slow, shuddering shots that he insisted were held for much longer than any audience, except perhaps the most art-house avant-garderie, would ever tolerate. You just see murmuring tides of colour. And there isn’t much action. The effect on Mars is limited to close-ups of glinting scarlet faces changing from grim scowls to moonbeam smiles, and long shots of lithe Martian youths and maidens throwing off slinky cooking-foil armour, while the Commodore nods approvingly from above.
And the clue to why he wasn’t in any studio films after Venus Invades Us is to be found in his role and ideas in that Mars project. He never auditioned, and turned away offers. There was more important work to do. He had started to believe he really was getting messages from Venus. An intelligence from that planet, he said, would descend upon him, and speak and write through him. There was nothing peculiar about his voice or his manuscript when this happened, they were just his, as usual. But what was communicated was not from him, but from a seer existing in a form we could not comprehend, within the ether of the planet of love. So fiercely had he, as an actor, concentrated on the role of the Venusian Commodore, that a real Venusian being had sensed the forces unleashed, and made contact to set the record straight. Which was, that the Venusians had no designs upon us except the guidance of love. And that was to be his mission from now on, to explain that.
Well, you might suppose that this was a scheme—that he saw he was a niche actor, almost a novelty, and surmised film-work might one day falter. Why not deploy his exotic image, and his undoubted flair, towards the gains to be made in the field of spiritual development? The Age of Aquarius was very much in the air, and people were seeking gurus anywhere. What he had to offer was a pleasing mix of harmonious utterances with a reassurance that we are not alone, and a strange, serene certainty. The bizarre origins of the story might in fact have a certain attraction, even credibility, for some.
I don’t think he was in it for the money. You couldn’t watch him at work when the form took him over, without thinking he seemed sincere: and, frankly, he just wasn’t that good an actor. The other thing is, he didn’t set himself up as a great wise teacher. He still frequented the same Soho pubs, drinking his sticky gin-and-black, flaunting a beige shirt festooned with mauve dandelion clocks and a scarlet chiffon scarf, had a few boys, a few girls (he was easy either way), smoked Bulgarian cigarettes he bought from a curious kiosk in Belgravia, didn’t pretend he had any sublime virtues, didn’t deny his vices.
But alongside this quite hectic and unpretending life, he would also hold what he called his ‘evenings’, once every few weeks, when the Venus Intelligence would visit him. They took place in his flat, by invitation. Some of his own set would go, but there would also be people he’d never otherwise have encouraged: some rather Amazonian ladies in thick skirts and cardigans and brick-like brogues; earnest young mossy-bearded men in black sweaters; balding bespectacled sceptics with recording apparatus and bitten finger-nails. They were all offered tea in the mismatched china cups he cherished, and Royal Scot biscuits, his favourite. And when the tinkling of the teacups and the biscuit-nibbling dwindled, he would strike a little Burmese gong an admirer had given him, and silence would fall among his guests.
Then he would begin, quite calmly and clearly, reciting the news from Venus, or writing it down on a stack of creamy foolscap sheets in front of him. Afterwards, he would look up at the assembly, as if slightly surprised to see them there, blink a few times and spread out his hands. Conversation would slowly resume while he got up and mingled. He never asked for money—some people discreetly left him a little on the mantelpiece—and there were a few cheaply-printed pocket pamphlets on a table in the hall, but that was all.
It was because of the messages, of course, that he tried to make All Against Mars. What they had to say wasn’t just for the coterie that gathered in his flat: it needed to be known by the world. And the best way to do that was in the medium he knew most, even though it was obvious the film wouldn’t have them exactly flocking in the aisles. There were some old friends who just couldn’t take all the ‘Venus speaks’ stuff and tried to shake him out of it: they just got the stare that could stop an Earthling anywhere. He still had enough credit in the trade to get a decent crew together, and in the end most of us did it for free or some vague promise of payment later, which amounted to the same thing. We could see what it meant to him. But there were all the usual delays, mishaps, tantrums, jinxes that you get with any film, and he began to think things were conspiring against him.
‘Mars has agents here, you know,’ he told me.
I thought he just meant this as a metaphor so I went along with it.
‘Everywhere,’ I said. But then I saw the cold fire in his eyes.
‘ “They must know our might”,’ I quoted, making light of it.
By the way he nodded, quick and curt, I thought at first he was joining in the game, reprising his role before the triangular screen. But then he added, very softly and solemnly:
‘And our might is love. We know that.’
I liked Triton a lot, and I didn’t see any sense in disputing with him about what he thought. If you stop and think about it, a lot of the obsessions people have are just as odd really: golf, fashion, cars, gossip, even film. We’re all just spending our time.
When I wrote some of the speeches from the interplanetary plenipotentiaries—yes, he insisted they were called that—for All Against Mars, he was very gratified. He said to me I might almost be channelling things myself, from the outer planets. I just smiled and said it was probably emanations from his influence, a possibility he seemed to take quite seriously. I will admit the words came easier than they often do, bu
t I thought that was because they were so vaporous.
Some of the keen admirers of Venus Invades Us have wondered if we shall ever see the return of Triton. It’s happened with other veteran actors of overlooked classics that are now regarded with much affection by cineastes. Someone has tracked them down, taken them to receptions and conventions, and they’ve been glad of how much fuss, and cash, they got. However, Triton will not appear anywhere, will not make any more films. Not here on Earth anyway.
It was Leila Vale who alerted me. She had stuck by him too, even in the Venusian phase. He was especially fond of her, because in the invasion film she played a starry priestess who tries to persuade the Admiral to call off the attack and make peace with Earth. It was only a few minutes on screen, but obviously it resonated with him, and she had a similar benign presence in the Mars film that never was. Or probably never was.
Leila had the sort of face—well, let’s just say she knew she wasn’t going to get any leading lady offers. Her agent called it piquant and most journalists stuck with that, once they heard how to spell it. She had keen green eyes, a long nose with a hint of a unicorn’s horn, and lips like the first and last quarters of a carmine moon, mysterious but sharp as sickles. What made her was her voice: if a cigarette could speak in smoky silver spirals, it would sound like Leila.
It started when he was attacked. She found Triton in the mews just beyond the Black Lion, huddled in the gutter. That wasn’t like him. He was usually too busy talking, mingling, to drink too much, and he only grew brighter as the evening wore on. And then she saw that his head wasn’t draped with the scarlet scarf, as she first supposed: it was seeping blood.
We never found out just what happened. But there had always been those who growled at his flamboyance, and that just made him flaunt it even more. There were vigilantes in those days, the usual armband and baton brigade. They might have got him. But he probably owed money all over the place too, because he didn’t have much, and what he had went into the film he was still trying to make. If he knew, he wouldn’t say.
‘We must just meet Mars with more love,’ was his only comment.
But after that he didn’t go out so much. He still did his evenings, but he was more cautious about who he let in. The gatherings were smaller as people got bored or embarrassed by the whole thing. Whatever you thought of the Venusian transmissions, he had always been a vivacious host, and the evenings had been fun. But some of that was dwindling away. The smart set went elsewhere.
And then Leila came to see me. It was usually a thrill to hear her lavender voice and watch the rose crescents of her lips, but this time she spoke so urgently I didn’t attend to those.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘He’s not eating enough, he strains his strength trying to get more messages from Venus, and he’s fading out. We have to rescue him.’
She had a plan, of course. I’d told her what Triton had said about my interplanetary speeches, just to share the fun. And she’d remembered.
‘He thinks you’re in touch with some other planet. So then: go there and tell him what they’re saying.’
‘What are they saying, Leila?’
She fixed her green gaze on me. She’d got it all worked out.
‘The Venus being needs to conserve its strength. It’s asked an ally in another planet to take over for a bit, through you. They honour the great and signal service to the universe he has given, but now he must rest. And so on.’
‘Leila, I’m not an actor . . .’ I began, but I knew it was useless. I’d seen him receiving so often, I knew how it went: I’d improvised this kind of stuff in scripting for the film too.
We went to see him. The curtains of blue Persian cloth in his bedroom glimmered like pillars of lapis-lazuli. He was lying on a battered green chaise-longue, like a naïad on a bed of moss. A lamp glowed like old agate in the corner, and his face was hollowed by shadows. He was so thin under the shimmering dressing-gown that when he rose it seemed no more than the rippling of a pool.
He listened to our pitch. I put all my craft into it, but even as I recited the lines Leila had made me learn, I hesitated. There was something hovering over the words, some impulse dissolving them, even as I tried to form them. I almost began to think I knew how he felt when the messages from Venus swept over him: only here it was as if there was a presence in the way of what I wanted to say. You could call it conscience, perhaps: even meant for the best, it all seemed a shabby ploy, in that room of his, so like a temple.
It was a measure of how far faded he was that even though he obviously saw through our ruse, he was merely gentle. The Triton of old would have scorched us. He softly beckoned me to stop.
‘It’s the agents of Mars,’ he said, ‘Trying to take over the signal. Resist them for me.’
We hadn’t the heart to continue. Leila of course tried other measures: she inveigled doctors, shrinks, healers, hypnotists, even, in her desperation, Zenith the willpower man, into his presence. The Triton we once knew would have quailed in mock terror at his biceps and big black eyes, but he only busied himself serving tea from the frail china cups, and talked about finding a role for him in the great unfinished film. Her last throw, bless her, because I really think she didn’t understand, was to get old Roderick Fox to visit and command him back to base. Triton told him, perfectly naturally, that he was about to be promoted to higher things. There was a slight hint of the old japer about him in that phrase, but it still seemed ominous.
At the end, I was one of just a few to go and see him stretched between stiff white sheets. He had an important message for me, he said. About All Against Mars. A faint whispering reached me.
‘It was an allegory.’
I nodded and took his fingers, which were like pale candles.
‘I know that,’ I said.
I saw that the prop rings he often wore, all tin and glass, but cunningly contrived to look like fabulous stellar gems, were all gone.
‘It wasn’t about Mars.’
‘No.’
‘It was about Earth.’
‘Yes.’
‘A prophecy.’
‘I see.’
‘I have to go.’
‘I know.’
‘Look out for the signs.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Go well, Admiral of All.’
I stayed for a few moments looking at that whittled face, more austere than ever: the still-blond hair, the dark eyebrows, the bones starker through the tautened skin. Then they came and drew the sheet back over his face.
Sometimes as I revisit the places we used to meet, I wonder about those signs. Whenever things go wrong, or I encounter any one of the numberless idiots inhabiting our planet, I just tell myself, ‘Martian agents’. But there are better days. I only have to catch a stray scent in the street, which might just be a fresh dose of cologne some lover has applied, to think that maybe the Admiral of All has ordered the first wave of fragrance down upon us. And I smile at that notion. Or I’m strolling along and I hear beautiful music coming from somewhere. Up in some tower block there’s probably a student rehearsing, and in all the angles and curves of the city the echo of their hesitant melody reaches me. That’s all. It’s not a solar system symphony. But I still look up as if I might see some stray gleam from the Admiral’s fleet. And then there are those dawns and dusks where a brilliant pink and a sombre violet hover on the horizon, and it seems as if some great cosmic paintbrush has been flourished above us, and I stop for a moment and gaze. Karmic radiance, maybe.
Yes, I knew the Venusian Commodore. He cast a light on this Earth for me, that’s for sure.
MARY ALICE IN THE MIRROR
Yarrow Paisley
I
From the mirror, Mary Alice watched Norbert prepare his breakfast. She didn’t understand why she had to be kept in the mirror. She had much preferred the bedroom with the yellow daffodils in the vase on the windowsill and the white daisies in a pretty pattern on the duvet; indeed, she loved to lie in bed and r
un her fingertips along the raised threads that outlined the daisies. However, Norbert was a man of mysterious impulses, and he had decided the mirror was to be her residence until further notice. She voiced her meek objections at first, of course, since she was so very ‘impudent’—an intrinsic character flaw of hers for which Norbert never failed to scold her—but there was no appealing to his stern sympathies. The mirror it was, and the mirror it would be.
Norbert’s breakfast consisted of Three sausage links absolutely swimming in maple syrup, Three yolks dallying sinfully in one luxuriant, milk-white bath, and Three pieces of toast for the mopping up. Three was a critical number in Norbert’s magic. The subversion of Three could lead to instability. Norbert was a careful man, and no such subversions would ever be permitted. He proceeded to eat, and starting from that very instant, the plate was clean in Three minutes—no more, no less.
During those Three minutes Mary Alice ate her breakfast too. This consisted of Norbert’s breakfast as reflected in the mirror. The sausages were delicious. She was no fan of eggs, yet she must eat them, and at Norbert’s eager rate—no more, no less. A speck of something on the mirror’s glass disturbed the taste . . . a minor annoyance to which she was well accustomed. It was almost Three weeks since she’d been consigned to this ‘prison’, as she privately referred to it (out of Norbert’s earshot, of course). Her sense of hope brought her to the conclusion that ‘weeks’ were the Three that bound her in the mirror, but her intellect—on the evidence of Norbert’s apparent satisfaction with the current state of things—declared that ‘months’ or even ‘years’ were far more likely. Something must be done. Norbert’s magic was inscrutable, but his character was straightforward and resolute; the consequences of her ‘doing something’ were assured to be unpleasant.
Strange Tales V Page 19