I had resolved to resist all blandishments and threats, even Deirdre’s withering disdain. I was not going do guard duty ever again. Then, about three days later, I met Sonia at a meeting. Almost as soon as I saw her I knew what she was going to ask of me. Yes, it was as I had expected, but this time she wanted me to stand guard every night for a whole week. She must have seen my dismay because, instead of exercising her charm, she launched into a tirade against all the people who had let her down over this ‘guard duty’.
‘I can’t understand it. They do it once or twice, and then they cry off. The reasons they give are all incredibly feeble. They’ve got no balls, no bottle. You know, Ed’s working incredibly hard to train up a cadre of leaders for the struggle ahead; and I’ve had to tell him that these people are quite unsuited for leadership roles. To be a leader, you’ve got to show first that you’re loyal and dedicated; you can’t just cry off when the going gets tough. Ed and I have great hopes for you as part of our inner cadre of leaders.’
You see, she had cunningly appealed to my lust for power; and this, I think, was the first time I consciously recognised it as a force in my life. I did put up some sort of feeble demur about having to do it for a whole week, so Sonia promised me faithfully that I would be relieved at the end of it. ‘I do realise, we are asking a lot of you,’ she said. There was a look in her eyes which told me that she was on the edge of hysteria. The pupils were little more than black pin pricks in those sea-green irises, and there was a tiny fleck of foam on her lips.
As a last bid for freedom I said: ‘Can’t you or Ed do it at all?’
‘We would, of course, but just at the moment we are so involved in action vital to the Movement. This is a time of crisis. The great struggle is beginning. Ed and I are needed on the front line.’
‘And I can safely be left in the rear,’ I said. ‘I quite understand.’
One of Sonia’s rather endearing characteristics is that she is absolutely immune to all forms of irony or sarcasm. This meant that one could relieve one’s feelings with a sardonic remark in the full knowledge that the barb would never penetrate. It has always astonished me that, despite this, she is an accomplished comedienne on stage. A kind of instinct must come into play, by-passing all intellectual faculties. She must be the theatrical equivalent of an idiot savant.
On the evening before I was due to begin my week of vigil, Deirdre took me to a fund-raising night for the R.S.W.P. at the old Half Moon Theatre in Whitechapel. I felt at the time rather as I had as a child when my parents took me out for a special treat before I went back to school. That was the nature of my relationship with Deirdre, except that she was more like a strict governess than a mother. She would mock my public school accent and ‘bourgeois’ attitudes, employing the same sanctimonious fervour with which Ignatius Loyola bullied any new Jesuit recruit who showed signs of his former life as an aristocratic dandy. But this evening Deirdre was less severe than usual.
I mention this entertainment only because I believe it had an influence on what happened to me. There was a comedian who made jokes mainly about Northern Ireland, an elderly and crapulous female blues singer who refused, despite repeated requests, to sing ‘Frankie and Johnnie’, and there were The Under-Dogs. The Under-Dogs were a band of socialist folk musicians who featured regularly on occasions such as these and were, as a result, immensely popular and celebrated in our little world. I believe they were extremely accomplished musicians in their way. They sang plaintive old songs about the plights of Lancashire weavers and agricultural workers, but they sang also about the picket lines of modern England, and, inevitably, British troops in Northern Ireland. There was a song, of theirs, called for some reason, One-eyed Pigs which had as its refrain, ‘Troops Out!’ This was taken up by the audience and the little ramshackle theatre shook for what seemed like an eternity to ‘Troops Out! Troops Out! Troops Out!’ Were we really as mindless as everyone else?
I can’t begin to describe to you the heaviness and dread I felt when I installed myself in the Red Worker offices the following evening. It was quite out of all proportion to the unpleasantness of my previous experiences. I felt anger with Sonia and Ed for their exploitation of my loyalty, but most of all with myself for not resisting them. The fear of being thought weak does terrible things to you sometimes.
Even after the first hour, the prospect of six more nights of this seemed intolerable. I really do not know how I spent my time in that gritty little office until I first became aware of the sensation that I had had before, that prickling, blushing feeling. I could describe it as a feeling of being watched, but it would be inadequate. It was as if everything about me was being scrutinised, including my innermost thoughts, and that one of the examiners was myself. It had no rationality, no acceptable meaning, and yet it was real.
At this point, tiring of my own compulsive introversion, I went to the window and looked out into the grey street, Nothing moved. I looked at the buildings on the other side of the road, and there in one of the windows directly opposite, but a little below me, I could make out a figure. There was a light on in the room, but it was dim and yellow as old parchment.
He — I was sure of the sex — had his back to me and wore a mustard-coloured sweater or cardigan which was threadbare at the elbows. His hair was long and greasy, about the colour of my hair, but streaked with grey. There was perhaps the hint of a beard, but it was difficult to say from a back view, and he seemed familiar to me. Something about the slope of his shoulders and the set of his head reminded me of my father, and yet it wasn’t him. He did not move, but I could tell that he was looking down into something, at roughly the same angle as I was looking down at him. I did not like the fact that he was motionless. Was there a twitch occasionally, or was this an illusion?
I remembered the time when I was ten years old and my parents had taken me upstairs in our house to see my grandfather lying dead in his bedroom. One is so used to seeing the human form in motion, even when asleep, that, when it is not, the mind invents movements where there are none. I remember thinking for a moment that I had seen a breath making his chest rise and fall almost imperceptibly, but at the same time I knew that it was not so: my imagination and my wishes had animated the motionless corpse.
It was so with this figure. I wanted him to move; I needed him to so much that I invented some tiny nod or shiver, but I was lying to myself. At last I turned from the window in a rage. I loathed the fact that I was afraid of the back of some stupid man in the window opposite, so I forced myself to turn back and look again. The window opposite was a dark empty space and no man stood in it. I began to wonder if any man had.
Sleep in the dull, ambiguous space of that office was not possible. I wandered about; I even switched on a small desk lamp and tried to read. There was a poster for The Under-Dogs, who were playing for an Anti-Fascist-Association benefit. I read the back of a recent Red Worker which, in a bid to attract its alleged constituency, had a sports page, mainly concerned with football. But football — or ‘footy’, as I was reluctantly learning to call it — has, despite my efforts, remained for me, like the Mary Celeste and those absurd corn circles, nothing more than a boring enigma. It’s one of the few things about me which continues to disappoint my party’s officials: it might even cost me the leadership.
This is beside the point, or perhaps not quite. That night was marked by dreary restlessness. Thoughts made no progress; they kept turning in on themselves: and the place was too quiet for comfort. I longed for something to distract me, and at the same time dreaded — I don’t know what: perhaps being invaded by another vision, like the one I had seen. It was a very quiet night in the city. It was so quiet that after a while I began to hear the whispering of blood in my own ears. A distant city clock chimed midnight. I counted out the bells, enjoying for a few moments the reassuring sense that, in a world outside myself, time had passed and would continue to pass. Then silence fell on me again.
But it was not quite silence. There are sounds
so tiny and indistinct that you really have no way of telling whether they come from within or without. That was the nature of what I heard. I held myself quite still and listened. It was music. Well, I suppose it was possible that someone somewhere not far from there was actually playing music. Slowly, because it was so faint, I began to disentangle the sounds. There was a flute — that was the first I could distinguish, because it was highest in the register — then a fiddle, guitar, a tambourine, and something like a human voice, slightly nasal in tone. And now I knew the kind of music it was: it was folk music. I think my absolute loathing of all folk music that is not thoroughly clacissised by a Vaughan-Williams or a Bartok stems from that moment, because, you see, I suddenly recognised which band it was that I was hearing: it was The Under-Dogs. The Under-Dogs were playing in my head. It was not as if the tune was familiar, but the quality of the sound was unmistakable. I could see in my mind’s eye the woman who played the flute, tall and haggard, with blonde-grey corkscrew curls that hung over tired eyes, savagely outlined in kohl. Now I knew I was going mad, but, what was worse, I was going mad to the sound of music that I did not really like.
I got up, shook myself, as if to shake the sound out of my head, and walked over to the window. It helped a little. The music was still there, but jangling indistinctly in the background. So now I looked out of the window; and I wish I hadn’t.
There was the man again in the threadbare mustard cardigan, standing with his back to me, as before, looking downwards. But this time he was not at the window opposite, he was below me in the middle of the road. I could see the whole of him now. He had on mud-coloured trousers and heavy, cheap shoes. A tiny bald patch crowned his head, oddly similar to my father’s, but again, I knew it was not my father. But why was he standing motionless in the middle of the road and staring, apparently, at its ash-grey metalled surface?
The man appeared to be suspended, unmoving, in time. I suddenly remembered something my nanny once said to me in the nursery. I had been making faces at myself in the mirror and she said, ‘Do that when the wind’s blowing in the East and you’ll stay like it for ever.’ I had been horrified, and it was a long time before I attempted another grimace. Somehow I was feeling again the same infantile shock and revulsion, only a thousand times stronger.
I tore myself away from the window and began to pace around the dreary, littered office. I might have turned on the light, but I felt safer in the dark. Exhaustion and mental turmoil competed: no wonder, I told myself, that voices were intruding into my head. There were several of them, all much the same, all argumentative. There was an argument about workers’ control and democracy. If the workers voted for a hierarchical system rather than for control by a democratically elected worker’s council, would this be democracy? How far should the will of the majority be overruled for the benefit of the majority? The arguments turned and turned in my head. I knew them all, and I knew also that they bored me to hell. Then these were joined by other voices, talking about football, and there was a fierce debate about The Under-Dogs: had they lost their radical edge? Had they sold out with their new album, called, for some unknown reason, Mortuary Doglicences? This was nonsense: I knew there was no such album. If this was insanity, then its greatest horror was the dullness of it.
A sudden noise from outside the door of the office came as a relief. At least the voices stopped. What the noise was, I cannot really say. It was some sort of bang followed by a series of dragging footsteps that echoed along the corridor which led to me. Could it at last be the long-expected raid by the ‘authorities’? I was glad at the prospect. It would renew my purpose: I could be heroic, enhance my position in the party. I opened the door and looked out into the long dim passage with its concrete floor and its dirty white walls lined with doors. There was the man I had seen before at the end of the corridor, his back to me again, but this time looking straight ahead and not downwards. It was surprising how much detail I could pick out in the dimness, but perhaps it was because the figure was now so sickeningly familiar: the greasy, greying locks, the threadbare mustard cardigan, the mud-coloured trousers. For a long ten seconds I screamed obscenities at the back of the unknown man. It did not move an inch, unless — unless I saw the left foot lifting slightly and begin to take a step backwards. I did not wait to verify my apprehension. I rushed back into the office, locked the door, shot the bolts, and stood still, my back to the door, waiting for the sounds to come again, the dragging footsteps. I heard nothing but my breath and the blood whirring in my ears. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a cosmic exhaustion. I longed to rest, to sleep until eternity ended. There was an old armchair that crouched low in one of the corners of the office by the main desk. Its springs were broken and its foam upholstery belched out at several points from its mean covering, but it was the only reasonably comfortable thing there. I collapsed into it and became almost instantly unconscious, heavy and dreamless.
A voice woke me. It was very close, so close I could hear its breath. The voice said: ‘Let’s see the footy results, then.’ My eyes opened and what I saw convulsed me with shock. Above me, as I lay sprawled in the low armchair, only three or four feet away, sitting in an upright chair at the desk was the man in the mustard cardigan. He had his back to me as before, but his time he was looking up, and though there was barely any light in the room, he was holding a copy of Red Worker up to his face, as if he were reading it. I could see the long greasy curls of his hair outlined against the light coming from the window, which picked out his features in silver grey. He was so turned away from me that I could barely see the outline of his cheek, but of what I could see, I could pick out every wrinkle and fold, every greasy pore, every straggle of the half beard. The head was still, the great bulk of his cardiganed body was motionless. Transfixed as I was by fear at this sight, I was filled with an even greater anxiety: that the motionless thing might move. So we remained, I don’t know how long, while I debated in myself what it all meant. Those words — ‘Let’s see the footy results, then,’ — what did they mean? All I knew is that they sickened me.
My body began to tremble. It was the only movement of which I was capable. It was like being in an earthquake. I tried to control myself because I was terrified that the noise I was making might arouse the motionless creature above me, and he would turn round. But the more I feared to move the more I trembled, and the noise of my trembling filled my ears like thunder. Then the bulk above me did move. Slowly, as if turning a huge weight, the man in the cardigan began to turn his face round to meet mine. I screwed my eyes shut and they burned me. I yelled and with a great convulsive movement I heaved myself out of the chair, and with eyes still shut, ran for the door. I fumbled with the locks and the bolts, my hands trembling so much that it all seemed to take an age; then, when they were done the sweat on my hands slicked the handle of the door so that I still could not open it. Behind me footsteps, thick and heavy, like the dragging of stage-weights, began to bear down on me. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, wrapped it round the handle and got some purchase on it. I wrenched the door open, ran through it, slammed it shut behind me, then began to run down the concrete corridor, down the echoing stone stairwell, and at last into the empty, small-hour streets of Clerkenwell. I set off at a trot in the direction of the City, where a bell from some Wren or Hawksmoor steeple chimed out three o’clock like a blessing. I would not look or turn back. The road led me on into the grey morning. Soon I stopped jogging and walked until London began to wake all around me, and I saw the first rays of the sun strike the Thames by Westminster Bridge.
That was my Road From Damascus moment, and I knew there was no possibility of turning back. I only had to think of The Under-Dogs and ‘the footy results’ and the terrible faceless man in the yellow cardigan to be filled with nausea and horror.
I cleared out of the squat that morning, went home to Gloucestershire, cleaned up, and the following week I was being interviewed for a job in Hazard’s, the merchant bank. Thanks to a friendly word from
a friend of a friend of my parents — you know how this sort of thing works — I got the job, and the rest is, I hope, history. I was as happy as a clam at Hazard’s — amassed a pile of wonga too — but I always made sure that I left my office, which was in the city, of course, several miles from Clerkenwell, on the dot of 5.30 every evening.
* * * * *
‘I still don’t see how this proves the existence of ghosts,’ said Josie.
‘It doesn’t;’ said Marcus, ‘it just proves their reality. What happened changed my life.’
Josie, whom I suspect of being a bit of a closet Leftie, said: ‘Many would say for the worse.’
‘Then they would be wrong. You see I had faced the ultimate horror: the possibility of becoming something that is not myself.’
‘No. I don’t get that,’ said Josie. To forestall any further argument I asked Marcus if he had come across anyone from his past in later life.
‘Oddly enough,’ Marcus said, ‘I saw Sonia Tombs only the other day at some theatrical charity do. She was going to cut me dead, me being a Tory and therefore untouchable as far as she is concerned; but I thought I’d have a bit of fun, so I buttonholed her and reminded her of our days in the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party. I honestly think she had completely forgotten me: after all, I had only been a foot soldier, and a deserter at that. I could see she wasn’t enjoying it at all and couldn’t wait to get away, and I must admit I took some pleasure in the anguish I was causing. Then I happened to remind her how I used to guard the Red Worker offices in Clerkenwell. Suddenly she stopped being all fidgety and irritable and became quite still. She just stared at me for a few seconds and then she did the oddest thing. She stretched out her right hand. I thought for a moment she was going to hit me, but she wasn’t. Quite the opposite. She sort of stroked my arm for a few moments, almost caressingly, you know, as she had done with the waitress in that café all those years ago. Then she just turned and left me.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 13