by Robert Irwin
‘I’ve just come back from Nazi Germany. You’ll be pleased to hear the Nazis share your views.’
‘Don’t talk to me about Nazism or Fascism. I’ve just come back from Spain. What the hell have you done in the fight against Fascism?’
And now Ned was shouting too,
‘If it comes to it, we’ll fight against puritanical authoritarians like you, as well as against the Fascists. People like you think that everybody has to be drab and dour like you. A good comrade never laughs. You take it for granted that politics, which is a sort of racket run entirely by people like you, is the be-all and end-all of life, and you have never taken notice of love or mystery as they appear in the world. Your sort of politics represents the death of the soul. Come on Caspar, we are going.’
Two pubs later, we were in the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place and I had got around to describing to Ned my struggles to control my hypnagogic images and communicate with them and my ultimate failure in this enterprise.
‘I thought that I had her under my power, but that girl, Trilby, lied to me – by omission at least. She should have warned me that, when I returned to England, I would find that Caroline had vanished. Also she should have told me that there was nothing serious between Clive and Caroline. Trilby has to be punished – Trilby and the whole crowd of imagery in my unconscious which she was speaking for. However, I can’t work out how to do it. There must be some way of torturing the truth out of my hypnagogic images. The trouble is that they are so elusive and, having no real bodies, I suppose that they are immune to pain.’
‘Don’t rush things Caspar. I don’t think you are being very rational about this. After all it would be crazy to actually punish Trilby, since she wasn’t really lying. She was giving you the best advice your unconscious mind could provide on the basis of the information that was available. But your unconscious mind isn’t actually an infallible oracle and you can’t treat it like that. No, to get better information on Caroline and where she is, you’d have to tap the collective unconscious.’
‘Sounds wonderful, but how the hell do I do that?’
‘I suppose you must think less and concentrate harder.’
‘I don’t think that I can concentrate harder than I have been doing in the last few months. And concentrate on what, for God’s sake? And where is the collective unconscious when its at home?’
Ned was silent. I hoped that he was casting about for some sort of solution, but I feared that he was so drunk by now that he was simply trying to remember what it was that I had just said. However, eventually he did produce an answer of sorts.
‘No, you are not thinking about this the right way. You as an individual don’t have a collective unconscious. It is a shared thing. You share it with all the people in this pub and with all the people in London and in the whole world even. What you need to do is conduct a kind of Mass Observation of the collective unconscious.’
Ned was enthusiastic about the prospect that he was now envisaging:
‘Obviously you can’t interrogate the whole world’s unconscious thought processes, but what you can and must do is take as large a sample as possible. Members of the Brotherhood will naturally help, but you will need more than that. You’ll have to stop people in the street and offer them money, so that they will let you hypnotise them and get them to communicate under hypnosis with their hypnagogic imagery and answer your questions. It will be pioneering work. You’ll be a Magellan or a Pasteur of the collective unconscious.’
I could not share Ned’s enthusiasm. It was obvious to me that his scheme was quite impossible. For one thing, he did not realise how utterly exhausting the process of mesmerism was for me. Every time I attempted to hypnotise someone, I could feel my natural electricity draining out of me, leaking out through the eyeballs. A project that demanded the hypnotising of hundreds or even thousands of people would certainly kill me. For another thing, by no means everyone is an hypnagogic subject. Only about a fifth of all adults regularly experience hypnagogic imagery. And surely people in the streets would be suspicious if I went and offered them money if only they would submit to being hypnotised by me? Surely they would say no. MacKellar was right. Ned, for all his brilliance, did not have good judgement.
‘I think perhaps I’ve had enough to drink,’ Ned said.
I was startled for, once Ned had embarked on one of these pub crawls, he usually did go to the limit. However, seeing the expression on my face, he continued,
‘I’ll be sick if I have any more alchohol. I want something else. Let’s go to Cable Street.’
On our way out of the Wheatsheaf, Aleister Crowley, whom I had not noticed before sitting by the door, sought to detain me.
‘My dear boy! How are you getting on with Dr Aczel’s Exercises in Practical Mesmerism?’ he said with an evil chuckle. However, I escaped his grasp.
Nothing can be more squalid than Cable Street, but within Scrupulous Chen’s opium den, as it was in pre-War days, everything was lavish in the oriental manner. Chinese servants in traditional dress glided silently across the thick carpets bearing the long pipes and the rolled and heated pellets of opium, and cups of tea to the clients who sprawled about on cushioned and curtained bunks. ‘Les vrais paradis sont les paradis artificiels’. The stuporous customers that night were an odd mixture of Mayfair socialites and sailors from the docks, plus, a scattering of East-End Chinamen. A couple of women in red satin dresses were dancing together, but no one paid them any attention.
I spoke no more with Ned, but I lay on my bunk and contemplated my hypnagogia, while I pondered the mysteries of Caroline: her first manifestation in a pub on her own, her secret visit to the waxwork museum in Paris, her skills as an actress, her decision to go the Chelsea Arts Ball dressed as Marie Antoinette, her insistence that I wear dark glasses, her real or imagined pregnancy, her vanishing. Surely at some deep level there was a pattern to it all? But before I could find that pattern, my thoughts had taken another tack, for it came to me that it was not she who had decided to hide from me, but I who had driven her away from me, for had I not by my increasingly strange behaviour forced her to reject me? I, only I, was responsible for my failure to control the vast electrical forces that surged through me. I was the master of and sole originator of my misery. Although I had not realised it at the time, it was now obvious to me that the moment that I had begun to study Dr Aczel’s Exercises in Practical Mesmerism I had entered into a Satanic pact. I recited quietly to myself ‘I am counted among them that go down to the pit. I am become like a man without help, free among the dead. They laid me in the lower pit in dark places and in the shadow of death.’
The effects of opium are subtle and they took some time to act on me that night. But eventually I closed my eyes and prepared to set out through the opiate shadow lands in pursuit of Trilby. No sooner had I closed my eyes than I found myself looking on a procession of brides, robed and veiled in white, who followed one another down a wooden spiral staircase. It occurred to me that one of them might have been Trilby, but, with those veils over their faces, it was impossible to tell. At the bottom of the staircase, I found myself in a Chinese theatre. A mandarin stood on stage and, as I looked, at every instant his robes changed shape and colour. Once outside the Chinese theatre, I conceived the plan of visiting the Musée Grevin in order to discover what it was that Caroline had gone to see there. Why I might even encounter Caroline there among the waxworks! However, I was unable to find the entrance to the Musée Grevin and indeed, though I walked amid tall apartment blocks, none of the buildings had doorways. The brides reappeared, walking down the doorless streets and through the French parks and formal gardens. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves, but my lipreading skills were rendered useless by their veils. Finally I gave up the attempt to find the entrance of the Musée Grevin and composed myself to sleep on the grass in one of the formal parks.
In the morning Ned and I emerged from Scrupulous Chen’s Place of Restful Abode and bade each other bleary farewells
.
‘See you at the orgy,’ Ned said. ‘Nothing matters more to me than that you should be there.’
Back in Cuba Street I found a postcard waiting for me from Clive. It read:
‘The game’s afoot! Messrs Meldrum, Franey and Hughes, Private Detectives, 39 Great Portland Street, are the people you need. Keep in touch and let me know how you get on.
All the best,
Clive.’
Clive seemed to regard the whole thing as a great lark, but I was seriously worried, for I thought it possible that Caroline might be in danger. I did not bother with breakfast. Opium destroys the appetite. I was still feeling rather strange. Even so, I hurried straight off to Great Portland Street.
The legend on the frosted glass door informed me that Messrs Meldrum, Franey and Hughes were chartered members of the British Detectives Association. I knocked and went in. A small man with long dark hair and drooping Dundeary whiskers sat at a desk surrounded by radio equipment. The desk was covered by three telephones, three ashtrays and a sporting paper. Maps and press-cuttings covered every available inch of wall space. One cutting from the Evening Standard announced in large letters ‘DONALD MELDRUM. THE MAN WITH A THOUSAND FACES’. The place made me think of what I had heard about the old Bureau central des recherches surréalistes, which used to have its office in the Rue de Grenelle, Paris. Reports were brought in by members of the Surrealist movement. These reports, which concerned dreams, strange adventures, striking coincidences and messages from the subconscious, were collated and studied. However, that was back in the 1920s and the whole enterprise had only lasted a year or so.
I stood lost in reverie. Finally, I turned to the man at the desk.
‘Which one are you.’ I wanted to know.
‘Meldrum,’ he said softly and gestured me into a chair on the opposite side of the desk. He fumbled about for his cigarettes and lit one, before offering me one as well.
‘And you are?’
‘Caspar. Just Caspar.’
‘Ah.’ Meldrum looked apprehensive. He must have thought that ‘Caspar’ was some sort of criminal alias, adopted to preserve anonymity in my dealings with him.
I asked him about the sort of work he undertook and he said that it was mostly fraudulent insurance claims, but of course there was also the serving of writs, divorce work, checking out the real backgrounds and financial circumstances of prospective brides and bridegrooms, the detection of pilfering in shops and warehouses and the odd missing person. Meldrum kept laughing nervously as he talked about his work.
I said that the case I was bringing him concerned a missing person and then told as much as I judged it necessary for him to know about Caroline, the circumstances of my meeting her and of her vanishing. Meldrum took notes as I talked. He frequently interrupted to find out how to spell words like Serapion, Surrealist and Eluard and he kept muttering and quietly laughing in nervous amazement, as if he could hardly believe the story I was telling him. When I had finished telling him all that I wanted to tell, he still had questions of his own.
‘Was your lady friend … er, ah ha ha! … a clean thinker?’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Ah ha! ha! Well, it’s not important … Was she perhaps a Roman Catholic?’
‘No, she wasn’t. Why?’
‘It saves me having to check the convents.’
‘Now, tell me, did she frequent dressmakers and clothes shops?’
‘Yes, she did. Quite a lot actually. Is that significant?’
‘Ah, ha ha ha! Yes. No. Probably not … only there are rumours you see. Ah ha ha, yes!’
‘What sort of rumours?’
‘Oh you can imagine the sort of thing. A pretty young woman visits a dressmaker. She goes into a cubicle to try on a new dress, but she never re-emerges. A pad of ether is slipped over her face and she is taken out of the shop in a packing case. A well-organised team of white slavers ensures that she is smuggled out of the country and put in a locked cabin on a slow boat bound for Macao or Shanghai. From Macao or Shanghai she will be shipped up country to be sold to one or other of the Chinese warlords. They are said to particularly esteem English ladies and they make use of drugs to turn these ladies into sex-slaves. Ha ha ha! It is of course a remote possibility, but it will need to be investigated. Then again since the Nazi persecution of the Jews got under way, the Jewish fur-traders of Leipzig have moved lock, stock and barrel to London and competition between the various fur companies has become pretty cut-throat. Your Caroline may have become the victim of a trade war. Then – another thing I must ask you – did she take drugs?’
‘No, not to my knowledge.’
Then suddenly it strikes me that he is talking about Caroline in the past tense.
‘You think that she is dead don’t you?’
‘Oh! Ah ha ha ha! No, not necessarily. There’s no need to get down in the mouth quite yet. But, as you read the papers you will have read of the Torso Murders. I shall certainly want to check the mortuaries.’
(In those days I never read newspapers and, of course, I had not heard of the Torso Murders.)
‘In confidence I may tell you that the police are seeking a certain Captain Willoughby who has fled to the Continent, but there is no definite evidence that he is indeed the perpetrator of these ghastly crimes.’
Then Meldrum sat in sober thought for a few moments before asking,
‘And in all the time you knew her, did anything strike you as odd about her behaviour?’
‘Only two things. First, when we were in Paris, she paid a secret visit to the waxworks museum and, second, in the last few months that I was seeing her, she insisted that I wear dark glasses.’
‘And, from what you tell me, you may well have been the last person to see her alive? Ah ha ha!’
That thought had not struck me before. Meldrum seemed even more nervous than usual as he said this. I for my part was nervous too, for I was conscious of all the electrical equipment in the office and of the electricity seeping out of my eyes. Then it came to me as I gazed on Meldrum, twitching and softly giggling to himself on the other side of the desk, that he was entertaining the possibility that I had killed Caroline in a fit of jealous rage. Presumably in this scenario, I had come to him either to throw suspicion off from myself, or because I was genuinely an amnesiac and had no memory of how I had slaughtered her and disposed of the body. Seeing my gaze, Meldrum looked hastily up at the ceiling.
‘The Case of the Vanishing Typist! Ah ha ha! Yes. It certainly sounds intriguing. A guinea a day plus expenses and ten guineas in advance. Have you a photo of Miss Begley?’
I passed one to him, together with the money.
‘What a doll! Why she really is as beautiful as you said she was!’
Then, as he hurried me out of his office,
‘You’ll get my first report within the next ten days.’
On Thursday I met Clive. He treated me to an expensive fish luncheon at Wheelers and, after getting every detail he could out of me about my experience in the office of Meldrum, Franey and Hughes, he wanted to talk about art and politics. He was disappointed to find out that I was not a Bolshevik, for he had rather assumed that all avantegarde artists were Bolsheviks and that long-hairs were united in believing that Russia was the country of the future. Not only was I not a Bolshevik, but I refused to talk about politics. So Clive was forced to confine himself to art. As was apparent from our previous encounter, Clive was intrigued by Surrealism, but he did not take it altogether seriously. He kept trying to get me to agree that the way forward lay with abstract art, with the work of people like Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and the members of the Unit One group. I told him that I was not interested in ways forward or the sort of mechanical progress he was envisaging. I was really more interested in movement backwards and downwards.
For reasons that will soon become apparent my memory of events in those last few weeks in 1937 has suffered and luncheon with Clive was the last thing of the slightest sign
ificance that I can remember happening before the evening of the orgy in the Dead Rat Club.
Chapter Twelve
There is no need I think to give a full and detailed account of the orgy at the Dead Rat Club. It features in all the social histories together with other scandals of the interwar years: the Stavisky affair, the manslaughter of Billie Collins, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Philipino egg scare, the defrocking of the Rector of Stiffkey and the Chu Chin Chow murder. At this point I have only to give my own personal impressions of what happened that night and explain how it in turn led on to the strange things which followed.
A backroom at the club had been commandeered and a thick black carpet laid specially for the event. The room was not particularly large, barely large enough, even with all its furniture removed, to accommodate the thirty or so people who assembled that night. Norman at the bar served oysters and champagne while we waited for everyone to assemble. Almost every member of the Brotherhood was there. Since we were a bit short of women, Ned and Jorge had brought up the numbers by hiring some high-class prostitutes for the night. There was a lot of smoking and joking, but no one was really listening to the jokes. Everyone was nervous, but the prostitutes were especially nervous – and also very suspicious. Apart from the prostitutes, there were a few surprise appearances; Pamela and Norman had both decided to participate. The man from the BBC whom MacKellar had talked to at the International Surrealist Exhibition was there together with his girl-friend. Most unexpected of all, Scrupulous Chen was also present, freely handing out cocaine and benzedrine on a first come, first served basis. Chen was a handsome man and a smart dresser and I caught several of the women gazing at him with interest.
Some odd bits of apparatus had been brought along for the event. Jenny Bodkin arrived brandishing a dildo shaped like a long black rat. MacKellar and Bryony came with a tray of tea cups which they said would do for a sperm-tasting session. However, the idea of purchasing sleep masks and prosthetic limbs had been abandoned as silly. Instead the lights in the room with the black carpet would be switched off and we, after stripping outside, would blindly make our way into the darkened room.