‘That’s ridiculous. This war is about ideas and individual freedom. They’re killing Jews in Germany, and I’m Jewish. There is a right side, and I thought you were on it.’
You reach out to touch my angry tears. ‘Does it hurt when you do that?’
‘What? Cry? Haven’t you ever cried?’
‘Certainly not. Messy. I thought you understood what was going on, Jenny, but you seem determined to cling to your illusion: the innocent young thing led astray by her demon lover. Aren’t you getting on a bit for that? Well, perhaps you need your story just as much as all these others need theirs: patriotism and glory and heroism and so on. I never can decide if you lot, human beings I mean, really want to be alive at all. But you, my darling Jenny, don’t have that dilemma.’
You lift your coffee cup to toast me. ‘You’ve cheated death, thanks to me. Just because I got drunk all those years ago and decided I wanted a companion, a spot of warmth in a cold, nasty world, an emotional consultant. I never aspired to love. That’s your job. But you’ll find your feelings stretch a little thinner each century. It’s not easy, this immortality. I’m surprised you can still cry about death. You’ll get used to it.’
‘No I won’t.’ I stand at the foot of the bed and stare at the man I’ve loved so humanly all night.
‘The common people always suffer. That’s what they’re for, they’re just the dull victims of the events we control. But you and I have risen above that, Jenny. Jenny?’
I walk out of your flat and go to the Turkish bath in Jermyn Street. Wrapped in towels, my pores open, my mind clogged with steam, I try to sweat you out of my system. When that doesn’t work I pick up a naval officer on leave, who takes me out to lunch at the Hungaria. The gypsy band and the Bulls’ Blood wine turn day into night, and we go back to his flat. The next morning, when he returns to his wife in Portsmouth, I sit in a pub in Charlotte Street until another man offers me a drink.
The following week I meet George again at the Ritz. I dance a tango with him, stripping as I dance, but when I’m down to my underwear and one earring the air-raid siren goes off and I have to descend to the shelter, shivering and giggling, supported by George. His face expresses a mixture of desire, amusement and disgust that becomes very familiar to me. As Virginia, I booze and bonk my way through the next year. Of course, wartime London is full of men and women who use alcohol and indiscriminate sex as anaesthetics. And very effective they are, too. I can’t remember much about the rest of the war.
Leo’s War
During the war I really did think we were happy together. THE war! When you’ve seen as many wars as I have you can’t help sniggering at the first rattling of sabres. When Assunta told me Jenny was coming back from Italy I was determined to make her stay with me. My Don Juan phase had lasted for several thousand years, but I knew it was over. Women still queued up to be seduced, and I obliged. But only out of politeness.
When I see Jenny again at Victoria Station I know she is the woman I want. I join the Air Force mainly to impress her, aware that my uniform and swashbuckling anecdotes will be terrific aphrodisiacs. The little flat in St James’s Square is my first property venture, bought with a mortgage from the Fizz. I want to stay in this flat with her and make love to her for ever, but I know she’ll despise me, as she did during the Great War, if I don’t fight. So I play along with the jingoism Jenny is simple-minded enough to believe in.
I go off to flying school at RAF Brize Norton expecting to be bored and disgusted, but, in fact, pilot training is the boyhood I never had. My fellow students are a group of eighteen-year-olds in grey flannels and open-neck shirts, English public schoolboys who call each other Tubby and Rotter and Lofty and Ginger. I am Holy, because my papers describe me as Leopold Bishop, born in London in 1912. In order to be accepted for pilot training I have to invent a pedigree: Shrewsbury, Oxford, Mummy and Daddy in Gerrards Cross, a passion for the football and cricket that seem to be the officers’ favourite metaphors for war. I can just about pass for twenty-seven, a year too old to lead a squadron – not that I’d want to – and nine years older than most of the others. Their youth startles me. I can’t look into their fresh, pink, hopeful faces without seeing them as they will be when they have melted and liquefied, just as I can never see a flower in bloom without simultaneously seeing it withered. I can’t help but see the tears in things.
Their annihilation takes months, not seconds. I have time to watch them turn from deferential children into wild, self-destructive young men, those whom the gods love – the gods, of course, have no feelings whatsoever, but I sometimes wonder how parents can bear to let their sons die so young. Why don’t they sacrifice themselves, those middle-aged men who are already so bored with their one life that they have to start a war to entertain themselves? Death is impatient for these handsome young men. Before they even have time to get to the war Ginger and Rotter are killed when their plane crashes during a long crosscountry night flight.
Flying, like conjuring, depends on timing, and mine is rather good. I’m charmed by the rudimentary little bundles of wood and metal, by my sexy leather jacket, Very pistol and Mae West lifejacket. Flying reminds me of other, earlier thrills, of riding and hunting. I love my machines much as I once adored my horses and can’t resist showing off. Of course, it is an advantage not to need a parachute, and I was navigating by the stars before Odysseus was born. I don’t really need the Bradshaw Method – steering by following railway lines – and before I’ve completed my training I am something of a legend, no longer Holy but Lucky.
A drinking bout in a pub in Banbury with my first crew; we’re all stamping and yelling as Tubby drinks a bottle of whisky in ten minutes. Lofty burns his girlfriend’s initials on to his arm with a lighted cigarette. The landlord and the locals tolerate our wild behaviour because we’re young and brave and doomed. We? If I had to join a group of one-lifers perhaps I’d choose this one.
Walking through the frozen mud to our aeroplanes, in a landing field miles from the aerodrome, it’s so cold that our clothes freeze as twenty-seven Whitleys take off together. Tubby loses his nose from frostbite, a little hors d’oeuvre for death before the rest of his face is consumed by fire a month later. It’s like the rhyme children chant to cherry stones: schoolboy, hero, monster, corpse. These young pilots have as much faith in their immortality as I do in mine. They hang up mascots in the cockpit to ward off death: Tubby’s is his girlfriend’s stocking; mine is one of Cleopatra’s teeth set in a lump of lapis lazuli; and Lofty’s is a home-made teddy bear with a face as blunt and blind as his own becomes after he crashes. What was the name of our wireless operator? So many names and dates forgotten.
I’ve finished my OTU and have finally joined my squadron when I receive the summons from the Fizz. Nothing so obvious as a letter, of course. I’m flying over France one day when I hear the words in my head in impeccable commercial Latin: go to the world centre of the Banca Metafisica on Wednesday afternoon at three. When I return to the aerodrome the next morning there’s a telegram telling me that my mother in Gerrards Cross has had a heart attack. Impressed by their efficiency, I present myself on Wednesday at High Street Kensington.
In the late thirties the Fizz had moved from the dingy old office in Lombard Street where ancient dust settled on even more ancient documents. Over the centuries I had an undistinguished relationship with them. I was usually in debt and obliged to work off my overdraft by pimping for convent girls or spreading syphilis – anything to avoid their debtors’ prison in the salt mines of Siberia. In the early twenties, when the investments Binkie left Jenny suddenly went up, I awarded myself a 50 2per cent cut. (She didn’t even notice; she’s always been hopeless about money.) When she flitted off to Italy I was able to give up the squalid life of a second-rate conjuror and reinvent myself as a fairly bright, youngish thing in London. But the power of the Fizz was always there.
So I am nervous when I walk into the bland new bank for the first time. My RAF uniform attracts comfor
ting smiles from two old ladies in hats and veils and gloves who are cashing cheques. A clerk leads me through a door in the panelling into a vast room. Above a chandelier, on the domed ceiling, there is a Michelangelesque painting of the money-changers throwing Jesus out of the temple, watched approvingly by thuggish-looking angels on blowsy clouds. A large man with a heavy-jowled face sits behind an enormous carved desk, his bald, squarish head almost covered by a vast birthmark. As I approach I see that it’s a shifting map of the world, also that he is wearing an SS uniform.
‘Ah, Leo, do sit down. I’ve been wanting to meet you for centuries.’
I am not often lost for words, but I really don’t know how to address him as Outer Mongolia flickers above his Reichsmarschall’s uniform. Should I salute or genuflect or shake his hand? He clicks his fingers impatiently, shouting at the ceiling, ‘Can we have something a little less time specific?’ The SS uniform is transformed into a yellow crinoline and bonnet, then a toga, and finally settles into a well-cut three-piece suit. The familiar coastline of England and France hovers across his face.
‘Sit down, sit down, don’t be a stranger. Just call me Your Almighty Excellency.’ He looks through some papers on his desk. ‘Brilliant war record, just what we’re looking for. How would you like to help us with some research?’
‘What kind of research?’ I ask, trying to see his eyes, which are obscured by Poland.
‘Technical stuff. The Bank’s expanding, and after all this nonsense is over there will be a lot of money to be made in aviation. We need detailed plans and photographs of different aeroplanes – German, Japanese and Russian to start with. We’re particularly interested in this pilotless plane the Germans are supposed to be developing.’
‘When will all this nonsense be over? And who is going to win?’ I ask cautiously.
‘Your guess is as good as mine. We take the pragmatic, international view, as you know. Old Schickelgruber may not have a brilliant record on human rights, but at least he has a vision. Today he’s the favourite in the casino downstairs, twenty to one last time I looked, but tomorrow it could be Uncle Joe or even Winston.’
‘Casino?’
‘Haven’t you been down there yet? Oh, you must go and have a little flutter.’ He hands me an envelope stuffed with cash. ‘We’re trying to encourage a more playful approach to current affairs. I don’t think much of your financial history,’ he comments, frowning at the papers on his desk.
‘No, well, I’ve always been more interested in sex than money.’
‘What could be more erotic than a bundle of fifty-pound notes? Don’t you think Jenny would agree?’
‘Oh, so you know about her. Well, if you’re so omniscient why don’t you do your own espionage?’
‘You’re not interested in promotion? If we were satisfied with your research we would of course offer you a directorship. If not …’ I try to look fearlessly into his eyes, but all I see is skeletal, ragged figures in chains, dragging themselves over a snowy landscape.
He stands up and swells into a vertical pillar. Spiral images of pain and suffering wind around him. Flames engulf a screaming baby, and the body of a decapitated woman swings from the chandelier. I have always kept my skeletons strictly in the closet, and this vulgarity upsets me, so I back away and shut my eyes. When I open them a second later I am alone in the room. Then I hear a campy giggle and, looking up, see one of the vicious angels leaning down from his cloud. He tosses me a black velvet bag.
Outside, in the calm institutional corridor, I open the bag. Inside are passports, identity cards and logbooks in my name in French, German, Russian and Japanese. There is also a camera the size of a cigarette lighter that I put in my breast pocket with my chewing gum and cigarettes. I can see the door that leads to the genteel lobby of the bank and the spiral stairs where ‘CASINO’ flashes in green-and-red neon.
I go down to what is still a fairly conventional gambling club, where men and women in evening dress escape the drab austerity of wartime London. I decide not to gamble on the outcome of the war but do rather well on the baccarat table, getting nine four times in succession. Then I pocket my winnings and go home to Jenny.
She is delighted to see me – and my money – and, as usual, doesn’t ask too many questions about where it comes from. We go on a spree, buying all the things that are not officially on sale: a silver-fox coat for her, a tailored black overcoat with velvet lapels for me and a Bentley the colour of dried blood to show them off in. Jenny has never been subtle. Her war is touchingly simple: she genuinely believes she is a pretty young woman doing useful work and waiting for her adoring hero to return. It’s a picture from a cigarette card or a film with Greer Garson. Charming. I don’t see why I should deface it.
My own war becomes rather complicated after my visit to the Fizz. Most people wait until a war is over before they change sides. By the late forties who could count the numbers of the maquisards and partigiani? They must have far outnumbered the armies of Hitler and Mussolini. And nobody in Britain could remember being seduced by Mosley’s ideas. I am even more flexible, transferring my sympathies several times a day while the war is still being fought. Flying is a game worthy of the gods, who have never been parochial. One coastline looks pretty much like another from ten thousand feet, and I have lived in every country in Europe. Of course, when I’m with my squadron I toe the RAF line and spout propaganda with the best of them.
But when I’m flying alone borders melt as arbitrarily as the young bodies of the crew I was flying with a few hours ago. Yesterday the charred corpse beside me was Fatty Langford; three hundred years ago the fields below were clotted with the blood of those who believed in their Catholic or Protestant God just as fervently as this lot believe in their Reich. Now even more defenceless people are dying, more towns and cities are being destroyed, the killing is more efficient, but taking sides seems as absurd as ever. I lived in what they now call Germany for longer than I’ve lived in England.
Since I have to make a crash-landing I leave my burnt-out Spitfire with its cargo of death and fly au naturel until I find a Messerschmitt that has been forced down in a meadow. Swooping down, I find a beautiful cadaver, a Teutonic Knight with gilded hair and waxen Aryan features complete with a duelling scar on his left cheek. On his elegant grey uniform is pinned a Knight’s Cross Oak Leaf Cluster, which means he was promised a fief, a real knight’s estate in the Caucasus. Oberst Gunter Kless from Fighter Group 77. I pocket his logbook for my collection and finger the grey leather of his new uniform, still fragrant even as his body begins to stink. I find a bottle of Cognac in the cockpit and swig it as I tinker with the engine of his plane. His bombs are still in place; he must have crashed soon after he left his base. I can’t resist trying on his marvellous uniform over my own dingy blue one and the rest follows quite naturally: the Cognac, taking off, seeing if I can get her across the Channel. Then it does seem a shame to waste those bombs so I drop them over a smug-looking town nestling in the Downs. Just for the hell of it. At the end of this wild night I leave the exhausted Messerschmitt in a field near Banbury and limp back to the aerodrome. I tell them I parachuted down seconds before my Spitfire crash-landed into the Thames. Treachery? I am not the worst of the war criminals.
Whenever I’m on pass I rush back to London and Jenny.
One night I watch her sleeping. She has cut her hair fashionably short, and its glossy blackness is like a helmet on the white pillow. The harmonious lines of her lovely face are stronger now than when she was truly young. I stroke the miracle of her silken elastic skin, brush my lips against the cheek that will never wither and dissolve, lift up her oyster satin night-dress to check the lovely inventory of her body, my body, before I make love to her.
Another night, another plane, another dead crew beside me in another aeroplane, the ‘Lily of Laguna’. Just me and the carrier pigeons in their basket, glaring at me suspiciously out of reptilian blood-red eyes. Creatures are so much shrewder than one-lifers. I have forgotten
the names of these six dead men, whom I only met this afternoon for the first time, forgotten which scrap of geography I’m supposed to be defending. Watched by the pigeons, I remove goodbye letters to girlfriends, wives and mothers from the pockets of five of the dead men. The sixth will have to be scraped out of the turret but not by me. I’ve flown four of the last five nights on chocolate, cigarettes and powdered eggs. A few minutes ago I put out the fire that killed the others, I need to land to see how much damage has been done to the plane, but I’ve no idea where I am. The fire has put my instruments and dials out of action, but the plane still flies. I pat her like some heroic wounded cavalry horse charging nobly into battle. Black dots above me might be Thunderbirds or Messerschmitts. My eyes are still dazzled by the glare from the last searchlights; my ears are full of the music of bombs. Ours whistle, German bombs scream and Japanese bombs sound like birds’ wings fluttering. But they all blow you up in the end.
Stars above, smoke below, the stench of charred flesh and the exhilaration of flight. One of the dots comes nearer, and I see it is a Messerschmitt. It chases me over the rooftops of what is, I can now see, a burning city. Good show. We weave and zoom and play like psychopathic children.
After a long hunt I shoot him down with my last bullets and, in the silence of dawn and death, glide over hedgerows. I can hear her mechanical heart palpitating as I land in a field that might be anywhere in Europe and tinker with her devastated body. There isn’t enough fuel to get back to England, and after seventy-five hours without sleep I can hardly walk, let alone fly or swim after I bale out over the Channel. If I’m captured I can’t die, of course, but there are many degrees of pain before death and I don’t want to count them.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 5