‘His name is Anton.’
‘We have heard his name before,’ said Mrs Bowles. ‘Does anyone here know Anton? Can the person here who knows Anton please speak this time?’ Aunt Dora gripped my hand again and said ‘yes’ in the faintest possible voice.
‘Is that you, Mrs Gibson?’ said Mrs Bowles, like a schoolmistress addressing a hesitant pupil.
‘Yes.’
‘Has Anton a message for Mrs Gibson?’ said Mrs Bowles.
There was another long pause before the voice of Valentino said: ‘Anton wishes to say only this. He says “Hetty is here.”’ I felt rather than heard my Aunt let out a half-suppressed gasp of pain.
‘Hetty. Does Hetty mean anything to you, Mrs Gibson?’ said the indefatigable Mrs Bowles. At this moment, however, everyone’s attention was disturbed by the fact that Fand was rousing himself from his trance, asking what had happened, and remarking querulously that he often couldn’t remember what his voices had said. Carl slowly brought up the lights. I wondered what had happened to the ectoplasm which we had seen seeping from Fand’s mouth. There was no trace of it, no damp patch on his shoulder, nothing.
We saw Mrs Bowles eying us in preparation no doubt for a searching interview about Anton’s curious message. ‘Come along,’ said Aunt Dora briskly, ‘we must go,’ and pausing only to put a twenty pound note into the basket in the hall, we were out of the house and into the summer sunshine of Larch Avenue.
As I closed Fand’s front door behind us I noticed a woman standing on the other side of the road directly opposite Fand’s house, looking straight at us at us. She was in her thirties, tall and dark haired. I vaguely registered a slightly uncomfortable presence and kept her in my peripheral vision while we took the short walk up Larch Avenue towards Aunt Dora’s house. Suddenly the woman was crossing the road and making straight for us. ‘Oh, dear,’ muttered Aunt Dora, as she approached, ‘I’m rather afraid that young woman is going to be the most fearful nuisance.’ Difficult people had a habit of attaching themselves to my Aunt Dora, attracted partly by her fame, such as it was, partly by her natural serenity, which was more fragile than they supposed. (If they considered my Aunt’s peace of mind at all, which is doubtful.)
The next moment she was on the path, barring Aunt Dora’s way home. She could have been handsome if there had not been dark circles under her eyes, had she paid some attention to her damp, lank hair, had her dress sense been more coherent. I knew that Aunt Dora, who had strong views about young women ‘looking after themselves’, as she termed it, would not approve.
‘Excuse me. You’ve just been at Norman Fand’s, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘I’m Midge Black.’
‘Can we help you?’ said Aunt Dora in a gentle, tepid tone of voice. Midge Black was staring at her.
‘Aren’t you Dora Gibson, the writer?’ My Aunt nodded and sighed almost imperceptibly. ‘Then you’ll understand. Can I have a word with you? It is rather important.’
‘I’m afraid my Aunt is very tired,’ I began. ‘Perhaps some other time——’
‘That’s quite all right, Geoffrey. It’s very solicitous of you, I know, but I think we can manage. I live just up the road. Won’t you come in, Midge, and have a cup of tea?’
I realised that my Aunt’s implacable sense of duty had taken over, and that nothing now would dissuade her from adopting Midge Black as one of her protégées. I made the tea while Midge and Aunt Dora settled down to talk. When I came into the drawing room with a tray of tea they seemed to be on intimate terms.
Aunt Dora said: ‘Oh, thank you so much, Geoffrey dear, I’ve been longing for a cup. Why Carl and Mr Fand can’t offer us at least some sort of refreshment, I don’t know. After all one does put a generous tip into that rather blatant basket of theirs. Now sit down while I pour the tea. Midge has just been telling me that she’s a ghost.’
Aunt Dora’s sense of humour — her preferred means of tackling most of life’s difficulties — had obviously asserted itself while I had been in the kitchen. It was true after a fashion: Midge was, or had been, a ghost. She was a freelance journalist who, having ghosted a couple of autobiographies by minor celebrities, had been approached by a publisher to do the same for Norman Fand. She had done much preliminary work, sorting out dates, family histories, press cuttings, and the like, but had not been as vigilant as she should have been over the contractual arrangements. When Fand decided to dispense with her services, she had been dismissed with an ex gratia payment of no more than five hundred pounds. On reading the book Me and My Voices when it was published — ‘not my title,’ Midge remarked, ‘I would have called it Me and My Vices’ — she found that Fand had made extensive and unacknowledged use of her research, even of her own writing in parts. In short, she wanted Aunt Dora to lobby Fand for a share of the royalties. She had no money to pay for a court case whose outcome would be, to say the very least, uncertain.
‘Oh, well, I am not sure I am best suited to . . .’ said Aunt Dora.
‘I am a single mother with an autistic child. I have to struggle every day of my life,’ said Midge. She was clearly the kind of person for whom suffering provides an unarguable justification for all kinds of behaviour, but she had made an appeal that my Aunt Dora could not ignore. My Aunt told Midge she would do what she could, but looked so troubled and exhausted by it all that I, too, volunteered to assist. At the same time I hinted to Midge that perhaps my Aunt needed to rest. I saw her to the door. Midge was profuse and voluble in her thanks, but it was a gratitude whose only purpose is to increase the burden of obligation. When I came back into the sitting room my Aunt was in a state of near collapse.
‘That is the trouble with weak people,’ she said, ‘they are so terribly strong.’
I knew it was the wrong time to ask her, but I had to. ‘Who’s Hetty?’ Aunt Dora looked up at me with wet eyes, yet when she spoke it was with calculated calm.
‘It is a very odd thing, you know. I have never told anyone this, I promise you. A year after Anton and I were married I became pregnant. The child was stillborn. It was a girl. We called her Henrietta, Hetty for short, and we never mentioned her again. Now, would you mind going? I really am most dreadfully tired.’
Two days later I rang her up, ostensibly to apologise for my asking about Hetty, in reality to find out how she was. She seemed calm, but she said: ‘Now, Geoffrey, I know what you’re going to say, so there’s no point in saying it, but I am going to see Mr Fand again. I have to talk to Anton about Hetty. You see, we never did when he was alive, not even at the end. This thing about Hetty simply doesn’t make sense. She was stillborn; she didn’t even utter a cry. I don’t understand how she can “be” in any sense at all.’
‘Exactly! It’s all rubbish.’
‘Well, maybe it is, but how did they know about Hetty? I have to find out. I thought it was all finished, but it’s not.’
‘I’ll come with you, then, if you must go.’
‘No, I’d rather you didn’t. I’m sorry, but I think your presence may be inhibiting.’
There was nothing more I could say on this subject, so I asked her why she had gripped my arm when she heard ‘Rudolph Valentino’ singing ‘Pale hands I loved.’
‘Oh, that! Well, it did come as a shock, because it was another thing I’ve never told anyone about. Anton and I used to think of “Pale Hands” as “our song”. I can’t remember the origins: I think it may have been playing in some tea shop at one of our first “dates”. The lyrics are really quite absurd, but that was what we rather loved about it. Especially that line: “Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far?” It made us laugh. You know, private shared jokes, they’re so terribly important. Just as important as sex, if not more so, because they last longer. And the tune by Amy Woodford Finden — what a perfect name for a Victorian lady composer! — swooning, dirge-like: we adored that too. Anton did a little arrangement of it for violin and piano which he sometimes played as an encore at concerts. If I was in the audience he always kept his eyes on me while he was pl
aying it.’
‘Are you sure you never told Fand any of this?’
‘No, of course not! Don’t be so silly, Geoffrey! I am not a complete goose, you know.’
‘No. I apologise. By the way, have you seen Midge Black again?’
‘Yes. She came round with her poor son yesterday afternoon. She really is the most thundering nuisance. She’s one of those people who goes around “spreading alarm and despondency”, as we used to say in the war. Poor girl: I know the type. Definitely more sinned against than sinning, but deserves to be.’
‘Are you going to speak to Fand about her?’
‘Well, I’ve given the wretched woman my word, so I suppose I’ll have to.’ Knowing my aunt’s loathing of any kind of confrontation, I felt sorry for her. All the same, I could not help hoping that the inevitable failure of her efforts would result in the very desirable severing of all relations with both Midge and Fand. I vaguely offered Aunt Dora my wholehearted support and rang off.
III
Events never occur as one expects them to, let alone as one hopes. A few days later, I had returned early one afternoon to my flat. The morning had been crammed with seminars and tutorials, but I was now free. I had already decided what I was going to do with my afternoon. I might later on, for exercise, stroll through the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum, but for the first hour or so I would devote myself to a new recording I had just bought of Spohr’s Double Quartets.
I have a flat on the top floor of a building in Coptic Street very near the British Museum. The ground floor, oddly enough, is occupied by an Occult Bookshop. I like the place myself, even if those few friends who have seen it say it is gloomy. I have all my books there, and my music. It might be described as dingy, by women especially, but its very inhospitability is what makes it what I want it to be, an intensely private space. The windows of the main rooms, bedroom and living room, look down upon the blackened old Bloomsbury street, and I can if I want to occasionally observe life from there.
I put on the Spohr CD and had sunk into an armchair when I heard my doorbell being buzzed. Anger and alarm competed: nobody rang my bell in the afternoon. Few people did at any time of day.
I picked up the entry phone and asked who it was. It was Midge Black: could she come up? If it had been possible to leave her on the doorstep I would have, but I am still just about a member of the human race. I buzzed her through from the street and opened the door of my flat. Two pairs of feet could be heard climbing up the bare wooden steps towards me.
She was with her son, a child of eight who looked uncannily like a half-size version of her: the same thinness, the lank, black hair, the hollow, dark-rimmed eyes.
‘This is Cyprian,’ she said. Cyprian made a strange half-bobbing, half-bowing movement but said nothing.
I ushered them in and asked Cyprian if he would like some orange juice. Luckily I still had half a carton in the fridge. I was not offering tea because my milk had gone off.
Cyprian tugged at his mother’s sleeve at which she bent down, and he whispered into her ear for about half a minute. When he had finished Midge straightened herself up and said: ‘I’m sorry. Cyprian only speaks to me, and aloud only when we’re alone. He has Asperger’s, which is a form of autism. He says no thank you, he doesn’t want anything to drink, but could he have some paper to draw on? We’ve brought our own pencils. This table by the window looks fine for him to work on.’
While I searched for paper Midge cleared the table of four box files and half-a-dozen back numbers of the Philosophical Quarterly, which she deposited in a neat pile on an untenanted section of floor. It took some time to settle Cyprian to his complete satisfaction, especially as all his requests, which were very specific, had to be relayed through his mother by whisper. When this was done Cyprian sat down to his drawing and paid no further attention to us. Midge asked if she could speak to me alone.
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t like people being in the room with him while he’s drawing,’ she said. ‘Is there another room where we can talk?’ The kitchen was too small and far too messy.
‘I’m sorry. There’s only the bedroom.’
‘That’s fine. Through here?’ We went into the bedroom. The only light was what filtered through the patina of grime on the window. The bed was unmade. I picked a pair of corduroys and a couple of shirts off the floor. I asked Midge if Aunt Dora had given her my address.
‘She gave me your phone number and I looked you up in the phone book.’
‘Why didn’t you ring me?’
‘We happened to be in the area. We’ve been to the British Museum. Cyprian is mad on everything Egyptian, of course. He now says he wants to be an Egyptologist.’
I was almost beginning to like Midge, so I asked her what she wanted.
‘We’ve got to do something about that bastard Fand,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the money any more, it’s more than that. He destroys everything. Your Auntie Dora won’t see me now. I think she must have spoken to Fand about the money situation, and they warned her off me. That’s what must have happened, because when I rang her yesterday she just put the phone down. They’re poisoning her, Fand and that — catamite of his. You’re fond of your Aunt, aren’t you?’
I admitted I was. Midge was looking round my bedroom with a look on her face I could not fathom. She sniffed. I picked some socks off the floor and stuffed them in a chest of drawers.
‘Yes, I believe you are. So what are you going to do about it?’
I had no idea how to answer this question. There was a silence. Midge watched me, her body heaving slightly. I had the impression that somewhere inside some part of her was laughing at me.
What she did next surprised me so much that I found myself unable to move or even think. She began to undress, quietly, unseductively, as if she were preparing for a night’s sleep. When her long thin, shadowy body stood naked in front of me, she said: ‘Are you afraid?’
I was forced to lie: I said no, but we both knew the truth. There is a glamour about being hurled into a course of action you know will have nothing but disastrous consequences. I imagine drug takers and gamblers feel this mysterious ecstasy of degradation. At any rate, I still call the short hour that followed back to my memory from time to time: the grey light, the tangled sheets, the erotic anger, the hungry lovelessness. I had never understood Baudelaire before.
Afterwards we talked, or rather she talked and I made noises of timid assent. It was all about Fand of course. She was obsessed by him; she wanted nothing from him now but revenge. I listened to her hatred as she poured it out, and the hatred thrilled me, because I could share in it without becoming wholly immersed. I could warm myself at the flames but not burn myself, I thought.
When we came out of the bedroom Cyprian was still at the table by the window, drawing. He barely looked up when we came in. Sprawled across the piece of paper I had given him was a vast ramshackle architectural structure. The details, drawn from the dead neo-classical grammar of the buildings opposite my window, were faithfully recorded, intermingled with Egyptian motifs: pyramid roofs, obelisk finials, hawk- and jackal-headed gargoyles. Taken as a whole the building he had designed was a monstrous, chaotic Tower of Babel. Midge praised it extravagantly; I expressed my sincere admiration: it was a powerfully realised architectural nightmare.
Cyprian beckoned Midge to him and whispered in her ear. Apparently he had expressed a desire to be fed. There was nothing in my fridge that was free of mould, so I took Midge and Cyprian to an Indian restaurant round the corner called the Shalimar Curry House, then sent them home in a taxi with the rest of my spare cash. As I was wandering back to the flat, my mind confused to the point of idiocy, I heard a voice singing. An old drunken vagrant woman was crouched in a doorway with a bottle of cider. She was a familiar local character; I had seen her about before, but had never heard her giving tongue. The tune was known to me — it was the sobbing dirge of “Pale hands” — but the words were from an unknown verse:
&n
bsp; ‘Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains,
Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,
How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins
Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell.’
IV
After that Midge came to my flat several times, often with Cyprian; occasionally, when she could park him on her mother, without. These events were always chaotic and disturbing, but they never lasted more than a few hours in the afternoon. Sometimes she would pour out her sorrows to me, as she seemed to be on bad terms with nearly everyone in her life, except her son; sometimes she would rail at me for what she called my ‘ivory tower existence’, and condemn me for not ‘doing something’ about Fand, who was always the target of her most venomous hatred. Sometimes we made love, if love is the word I am looking for. Once she tidied my flat which, I suppose, was ironic, considering what she was doing to the rest of me.
Cyprian, when he came, continued to communicate entirely in whispers through his mother. He drew prolifically and with intense concentration, always those vast, chaotic structures. They resembled no building I had ever seen: there was something organic about them, as if they had generated their own increase like huge fungoid growths. I noticed, though, that he never drew any human figures to inhabit their spaces, and once I asked him why. The answer, communicated as usual via Midge, was that people made noises, and he didn’t like noisy buildings.
During this time, which must have lasted about four weeks, I did not keep in touch with Aunt Dora. I was, I suppose, ashamed to, but it was cruel of me. Eventually, one day she rang me up to reprove me for not coming to her last monthly ‘At Home’. I immediately arranged to go to tea with her the following Sunday.
I was shocked by the difference that I saw in her. She was pale and haggard. Her mouth was slightly twisted on the left side, which I guessed to be a recurrence of the Bell’s Palsy that she had suffered from a year or so before. I was very apologetic about not having visited her.
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