Today when I return to my lonely flat there’s a note from Sibyl, in ancient Greek, inviting me to the Institute of the Mothers. What can she mean? Jam and knitting hardly seem to be her kind of thing. Perhaps I mistranslated. Anyway, it’s in Eaton Square, so it obviously pays to be motherly. I’m going there on Friday for lunch. I’m rather looking forward to some home cooking and some pleasant female company.
I turn up in the smartest clothes I still possess: a navy suit, red silk tie and clean white shirt. The gilded cage of a lift opens straight into a drawing-room done up in bordello Renaissance style with gold elephants, pink tart’s-knickers curtains and shiny hunks of furniture jostling to impress. I’m surrounded by women of a certain age, expensively overdressed.
I act delight, turn on my charm and circulate, kissing hands and complimenting sagging allures. Far from feeling allured, I’m desperately wondering what they want from me. The names of these women mean nothing to me, although once or twice I vaguely recognize a flash in a much-mascara’d eye or brooding power in a lipstick-smothered mouth. My confusion is increased by the champagne to which I help myself. For a moment it seems as if the circle of women around me is distinctly menacing, and as each one approaches me with gracious coos I feel like the blindfolded victim of blind man’s buff, being spun around and tossed between his persecutors.
Then I spot Sibyl, who is, or so I think, a friend. Over these last few difficult years, as I have tried to turn myself into an ordinary man, she has been my style consultant. I’ve spent hours on her couch, and she has been marvellous; her only limitation is her tendency to talk about herself. Normally, when I see her, I’m horizontal. Her size, or lack of it, always surprises me. She barely comes up to my elbow as she stands beside me in her black silk suit, her tiny hands bulging with gold and jewels like a kleptomaniac toddler. ‘Sibyl,’ I hiss, ‘what is all this about?’
But she continues to smirk and says in a loud voice, ‘After lunch we’ll have a private screening.’
‘A film? How nice. Holiday snaps?’ I ask, stifling a yawn and furious with myself for not inventing an urgent two o’clock appointment.
‘You could call it a family film,’ Sibyl says with a gracious smile.
Lunch is a magnificent buffet. On these occasions you have to choose between eating or talking, and I’m afraid I shamelessly go for the greedier option, refilling my plate again and again. I exclaim with delight as I recognize tastes I haven’t experienced for centuries: a dormouse stuffed with pine kernels; a boar’s head with tusks of macaroni and prunes for eyes; sparrows pickled with fermented rice; chrysanthemum leaves with walnut dressing; ostrich brains; gefilte fish; Caribbean crab cake; salmagundi; almond flummery; honeyed quinces; and Aztec chocolate with chillies. I must say that transhistorical globalization has its moments. I realize that these women have moved far beyond the rice puddings one might expect at a Mothers’ Institute meeting. Then I notice that the magnificent centrepiece is a marzipan subtletie, something I haven’t seen since the court of Louis XIV. It seems to represent the final scene of Don Giovanni. ‘Most ingenious,’ I beam as I break off the Commendatore’s head and eat it.
My friend Byron used to say that an old man’s senses are all in his stomach, and as the world contracts to the enchanted circle of my overflowing plate I hear the background chatter of women’s voices. Gushing, I imagine, about grandchildren and clothes and recipes.
I’m just digesting my second cup of coffee when there is a flash and the room tilts. You might think it would be impossible for an old ham like me to be surprised by such tricks, but I am. There are not many earthquakes in Belgravia.
The ostentatious reception room vanishes, and we appear to drop, painlessly, down through several floors to a mouldy cave-like place. We are in one of those corridors of lost time hidden beneath the blandness of late-twentieth-century London. Our mass-produced clothes are replaced by flowing dark robes, and the circle of women who surround me have that unmistakable Walpurgisnacht look. Their makeup has camouflaged faces of terrifying power, and they are all staring at me. My hand rises defensively to my stubbly chin and shaggy hair – a sort of eternal seediness has crept in since I became a solitary – as I fiddle with what was once my tie.
Sibyl steps towards me. Not the tiny caged oracle or the elegant Viennese shrink but a third persona, fierce and angry, a prophetess. Her voice becomes husky and resonant, full of terrible certainty. ‘Sisters, daughters of Chaos, we have come together today to forget the low-key moans and grumbles of an age when nobody believes in anything. You all know Leo – most of you have slept with him …’ (I look more closely at the faces glowing in the strange greenish light. I recognize an Egyptian priestess I had an affair with when cats were still sacred and the abbess of a great convent near Siena, who captivated me in the eleventh century. In fact, they are all vaguely familiar. I feel like an old roué – or, rather, an old ruin. As I listen to Sibyl and watch the faces around me I realize that all my most important experiences have happened with women, through women, because of women. If anything has battered me it is the forces of sex and, more recently and painfully, love. I stop wondering why they have invited me.) ‘… Others have encountered him at the Metaphysical Bank. For four years now Leo has been my patient, if one can use that word of such an impatient and fundamentally selfish man. How often over those years I have tried to share my experience with him, to show that I understand. As I don’t have to tell you, we’re all immortals under the skin. If you prick us we don’t bleed, and if you stab us we don’t die – can’t die. But Leo doesn’t want fellowship with me or with anyone else. He feels he has been ill-treated by Jenny, a flighty young woman of a hundred and two. It is the fate of all of us to depend on the creatures we create, and this has happened to him. Jenny, tired of his vanity and frightened by his underworld connections, fled with her daughter, and Leo wants to know what has happened to them.’
Sibyl pauses. I feel absolutely sure that she does know what has happened to Jenny and Abbie and that she could have told me at any time in these last four years – if I’d grovelled a bit more. Women always talk about masculine vanity as if they had none themselves. I know the film show is about to begin and have a horrible suspicion that I am to be its star.
‘Leo has been going through a crisis. Like all of us he has changed form many times over the centuries, but now he has lost his nerve. We are all accomplished at parthenogenesis. Without wishing to boast, I have given birth to myself a hundred and twenty-seven times, in as many different languages, in every part of the world. In a few years it will be time to be born again, and I’m toying with various ideas – a New Age prophet in India? A scientist in Antarctica? You will find a suggestion box in the hall. I am hardly an ingénue, but I do still have an appetite for life.
‘Leo, however, feels that he has had enough. I don’t have to tell you how innately conservative men are. The old monks who persecuted us for so long used to say women and the devil were the same. What we do, perhaps, have in common is a certain curiosity and enthusiasm for change. Well, Leo has lost that. He wants one life, one woman. He has fallen in love, not just with a very ordinary woman but with this troubled and faithless age.
‘I have brought you all here today because I don’t know what to do with him. Has an immortal the right to choose mediocrity? In the old days, of course, he would have been chained to a rock and vultures would have pecked out his liver for eternity. But in these wishy-washy liberal times crime and punishment are as muddled as everything else. Now we’re going to watch a few scenes from his long and questionable life, and I’m going to ask you to be the judges of whether Leo should be allowed to abdicate his immortality.’
I look around for some kind of screen. What do I expect? A sort of immorality play, I suppose, for what can only be described as a hardcore audience. I wouldn’t want to try to shock any of these women, and I’m not exactly Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells myself. Anyway, how can a man be scandalized by his own life?
This is what app
ears to happen, as we stand in a circle in that metropolitan cave. Jenny appears. Seeing her again, I’m so moved that I want to rush up to her, but Sibyl, standing beside me, whispers harshly, ‘If you touch her you’ll never see her again.’
Jenny is very young. Of course, she never looked very old, but there is an adolescent gawkiness about her as she stands, twisting a shiny black corkscrew of hair around her finger, tears dripping down her face on to the corset that bites into her firm, young body with the savagery clothes used to manifest towards women. She’s standing on a dusty stage, and I inhale again that smell of sweaty costumes, dirty props, greasepaint and hot gas lamps. Standing over her, glaring down distastefully at her crumpled face, is a thin young man in an evening suit. Me and not me.
‘I just want to go home. I’m so tired. We’ll start again in the morning.’
‘Stop snivelling, I can’t hear a word you say when you whine and sob like that. Your diction is bad enough to begin with. Now blow your nose and get it right this time. Bertie has gone home, but you can do it without the piano. Remember, you want them to go; you’re happy for them. The song rather loses its point if you’re dissolving into tears as you sing “Goodbye-ee, don’t cry-ee”. Now pick up your props, that’s right, white feather in your left hand and the flag in your right. Come on, hurry up, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’
‘What about you, Leo? Which one shall I give you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You can’t wait to shove our brave boys off to be slaughtered.’
‘They’re not going to die. You’ve been listening to defeatist propaganda.’
‘I know what happens in wars. My father told me about the Boer War – anyway if you’re such a blooming patriot how come you’re not buggering off to France?’
‘Really, Jenny, how ungrateful you are. What would you do without me?’
‘I’d be better off without you, bullying and yelling at me all the time. Might find a fella what cares about me.’
‘Who, not what. Well. I’m really rather shocked by your heartlessness. I’d like to join up, of course I would, but unfortunately I had TB a few years ago. I have a medical certificate.’
‘You’ve got a bloody great chest of ’em. Medical, birth, marriage – well, they can’t stop a girl from thinking.’
‘I certainly wouldn’t wish to do that. Your intellectual life must be a great strain.’
‘See, there you go again. Sarcastic bastard. Think I’m stupid, don’t you?’
‘What thoughts you have, Jenny, were put there by me. That’s right. Blow your nose. Tears accomplish nothing.’
‘I’m only crying ’cause I’m so bloody angry.’
‘Your nose is red; you look hideous. Now get on with your routine. You’ll never be much good, but you may at least learn to sing in tune and dance in a less ridiculous fashion.’
At this point I step forward into the shadows between the phantom Leo and Jenny, who vanish as I protest, ‘I never said that! I got impatient, of course I did; she was lazy. But I was never cruel to her.’
‘He’s in denial,’ one of the Mothers remarks wearily.
‘She should have dumped him then instead of hanging around for another seventy-five years,’ the ex-abbess agrees.
Sibyl pulls me firmly back into the ring of watching, judging women. ‘You don’t help yourself by barging in like that. You can’t change the past.’
‘But that wasn’t the past, that’s the whole point. I never said those things.’
‘How do you know? These are projections of Jenny’s memories. Why should you remember that scene more accurately than she does?’
‘So she is alive!’
‘Shut up and watch.’
Jenny reappears, and I feel again that hot soreness in my eyes, that clutch of pain where my heart would be. The pain of mortality, which I’m asking these pagan harpies, these subterranean goddesses, to grant me. For a few hours they have put on recognizable forms to lull me, as Sibyl has done for the last four years. I look around for her and see her, tiny, at my elbow.
Jenny is not quite so horribly young this time. A few years of working the halls and sleeping with me and dozens of others have coarsened her a little. Twenty-one? 1918? About the time the naïve and ridiculous George appears on the scene. I don’t remember resenting him in the least. I have never suffered from jealousy, one of the sillier mortal failings. However, here I am, or here my illusion is, in my old Harlequin costume, bending over the beautiful girl in white.
That period when women suddenly changed shape, lost their curves, grew legs like stalks out of the mystery of the long skirts that had enveloped them for so long. Even to a jaded palate like mine the emergence of long, silky legs and arms is exciting. And Jenny’s are so beautiful. Watching my phantom self stroke her leg as he peels her stocking off, I can feel again that soft place behind her knee where the blue veins meet like tributaries of a river in the white estuary of her flesh. My hand twitches out, craving her remembered geography, but Sibyl slaps it down.
‘Do you let him do this?’
‘Who?’ Her voice is not yet elocutionized; it still has the flat, hard vowels of the East End. A gritty, resilient voice, not a victim at all, as I want to point out to the watching judges.
‘Your dozy law student. He’s waiting out there again in the street; he’s probably been waiting all night. I never saw such a booby. Just as well he was too young to go to France for more than a few months. A sitting duck if ever I saw one.’
‘He loves me. You would think that’s daft.’
‘How can you say that, Jenny? Haven’t I devoted myself to you for years now, day and night. Specially night.’
‘Only because you think I might be a star and earn you a few bob.’
‘Is that what you think? That I’m after your non-existent money? No, my dear, you’ll never be a great variety artiste. At best you’ll struggle in the provincial halls and revues. Your best performances aren’t in public at all but in private, in bed, with me … What’s the matter?’
She jumps up, kicks me in the balls and leaves me doubled up in agony, foolishly clutching her stocking. Even if he is only a misremembered Leo I feel the pain and humiliation again, her power over me. Jenny rushes out, not caring that one of her legs is bare or that her elderly landlady is watching as she runs downstairs and out of the house. ‘There, you see, she was the bully, not me,’ I insist to Sibyl as the images fade. ‘She was always attacking me, leaving me …’
But instead of sympathy I hear a savage howl of laughter. All the Mothers are cackling at me, even Sibyl, their faces wild masks of contempt and mockery. I want to run away, but I can’t break out of their circle.
Finally, between gasps of hysteria, Sibyl speaks. ‘Oh, Leo, thank you. I haven’t laughed like that for centuries. You can go. We don’t have to sit through seventy years of domestic cliché.’
‘It may be cliché to you, but to me those scenes with Jenny are the central experience of my life – a life almost as long as yours.’
‘Exactly. What use is immortality to such a banal fellow?’
‘What use has he ever been? Roaming the centuries like a rutting stag.’
‘He deserves to be a human being.’
‘Let him die in the arms of his girl, his old girl, if that’s what he wants.’
‘You’re wasting our time, Sibyl. If I didn’t have such aeons of it I would be quite angry with you.’
They all turn away from me, and I’m afraid they’ll disappear before I can ask the question that has been disturbing me for many years. ‘Before you go – I don’t suppose we’ll ever meet again – please tell me, am I Abbie’s father?’
I long for some oracular answer. Instead, their figures grow dim and fade until I’m alone in that cave-like place, surrounded by damp mist. I feel a wave of panic and rage, as if they are, all of them, really my mothers and have just abandoned me. Then the cave revolves, so fast that it makes
me feel sick.
I find myself standing in a grey concrete tunnel, its walls covered with graffiti. I am alone except for a ragged old woman who sits on the ground on a filthy sleeping-bag, wheezing on a mouth organ. I stoop to give her a pound coin and follow the tunnel up a ramp into the bright afternoon of Hyde Park Corner.
Lost Children
Nowadays you’d hardly know Mum is blind. She looks after the kids and moves around the tunnels so confidently, like she’s come to a private arrangement with the air to suspend the laws of gravity. She never falls over as she glides swiftly, tapping her stick so fast it sounds like a machine. She used to go on talking to people after they left the room – in the days when we lived in rooms – but now she seems to know exactly whom she’s talking to.
For the first year we thought they’d come and evict us from our bunker. Them, the people up there with capital letters and bossy voices who tell people like us where and how to live. I know about London property prices, I stare at the windows of estate agents every day. Even subterranean dumps like this must be worth a fortune. We never again saw the man who gave me and Rosa the key. If this bunker belongs to the Underground, maybe they have no use for it. Or maybe it belongs to nobody, a forgotten scrap of the city that sweeps past us, above us, leaving us down here among the rats and the lost children. Or maybe we’re allowed to squat here in return for looking after all these children the local authorities don’t want to pay for. Most of the time we’re too busy to think about it.
It’s not exactly Buckingham Palace, although that might be their sewers we can hear. It’s really damp, and you can hear tube trains and buried rivers roaring and gurgling just the other side of the wall. Our décor is minimal: scarred and mouldy concrete, grey with patches of green on it. There are thirty-six triple bunks, and the space between them is plastered with faded posters reminding us that careless talk costs lives and a day out in Margate is a treat for all the family, so we’re still fighting some kind of war down here, and I don’t think we’re winning. The floor’s covered with sleeping-bags and mattresses we’ve scavenged from skips, with a few gas stoves and camping lamps and, in one corner, a chemical loo. Beside it, in big cardboard boxes, there’s our clothes bank. You have to dig into it every morning to find something that more or less fits. Now, after four years, the rats stay away most of the time, discouraged by the clean floor.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 29