The Whispering Swarm

by Michael Moorcock

  ‘I think Rex and Polly have something important to tell us,’ announced Helena with forced cheer. And then a child caught her attention for the moment and she had to leave the table. I hoped nobody had heard her. Rex and Polly already knew they were getting married and thought everyone else did, too. I didn’t make any effort to follow through. My mum, who had kept out of everything pretty successfully, stared at her plate, eating automatically with steady stolidity. Every so often she looked up at me and winked. She knew she was in a madhouse. As soon as she could, she joined the children for a seasonal game or two.

  ‘Important?’ enquired Rex in anticipatory relish. As usual he hoped for a scandal.

  Polly, raising her massive eyebrows, frowned at Rex and was spotted by Helena’s mother.

  ‘I thought you were going to announce your engagement,’ said Helena, a little lamely.

  ‘I thought we had,’ said Polly. My mother started to clap.

  Shortly after the pudding was served Jack felt sick and rushed off to throw up rather audibly while Polly and Rex had another argument climbing the stairs to the living room. We enjoyed the big Christmas pudding as best we could. Meanwhile another diversion came when Kitty accused Sally of pinching her silver threepenny bit out of the pudding. I reminded her that the rare silver threepences were redeemable for use next year. An IOU would work just as well for wishing on.

  There was a break in the action when Mrs Denham, in the absence of her daughter, glared at the ceiling and asked why on earth the children couldn’t eat at the same table as the adults. Hoping to divert a row between her and Helena, I told her I had bought them their table and chairs as a step towards adulthood. ‘Aren’t they having a great time?’ They weren’t breaking anything and apart from the odd bit of arbitration, they didn’t need supervision. Their maternal grandmother thought they did. A lot of mysterious giggling then recaptured her attention. My mother had gone off to hide. The children began to count. Grandma rose to her full height, set her face like a knight lowering his visor and reached for her metaphorical sword. Still desperate to distract her, I pointed out that the kids were clearly having a much better meal than anyone else and they didn’t even need alcohol to do it.

  ‘Is that a dig at me, Mike?’ asked Mrs D, firmly readjusting her paper crown. I knew that tone as well as I had known the tone of the Clerkenwell Kings, our local Teds. She was looking for trouble, just as her clan traditionally looked for trouble at this season. Their end-of-year settling of scores. Helena and I hated her family when they were like this. The sounds were still murmuring away in the back of my head. I didn’t reply to my mother-in-law, though I couldn’t help thinking her crown added to her resemblance to the Queen of Hearts in Alice (or was it the Queen of Spades in Tchaikovsky). I was relieved that she had no actual right to a crown or she might have sent a few of us to the chopping block that day. I almost felt sorry for the poor woman, being denied her regular family rituals. My mother leapt out of a cupboard. The children shrieked.

  The whispered conversation from upstairs had taken on an added sharpness and reminded me of two cats spitting.

  The entertainment might have been further refined if the majority of the guests had any idea what the row was about. Somehow curiosity encouraged my own mother to stick her black-dyed fuzzy mass of hair back through the door and ask, sotto voce, what the hell was going on, then regret her question. We didn’t know anyway. We wouldn’t discover the truth for a while because the front door slammed. Below, in the kitchen, we fell silent. l got up and went to the bathroom next door. I came back out and crossed the hall to the girls’ big room full of toys and Christmas stuff. Beyond that were the dark French windows into the dark, glittering garden. I lifted the lid of the piano and played a few bars of an R&B riff. The whispering had grown louder, almost like running water. I needed to pull myself together.

  ‘I’d guess Jack won’t be coming back for his pudding.’ My mum stood in the doorway grinning. I shook my head and smiled back at her. We went back into dinner together. Polly and Rex had grown drunker and more strained until suddenly Polly leapt up from her chair and disappeared upstairs. Another slam told us she, too, had left, probably off to find Jack. The children, giggling and pulling crackers back at their little table, noticed nothing.

  ‘This is getting to be like a French farce,’ said Mrs Denham, and we all pretended not to hear her.

  The Princedale Road house was only about ten minutes’ walk away around the corner. We looked to Rex for an explanation but he was too busy pretending nothing had happened and wouldn’t reply. He had found the mince pies and drawn them towards him. Almost defiantly, he took a large helping of Christmas pudding and brandy butter which he began to eat with steely determination before jumping up and heading for the toilet. A short while later the front door slammed for a third time.

  ‘It sounds like a lovers’ tiff to me,’ said my mum. ‘But who on earth are the lovers?’

  For a few minutes there was silence broken only by the occasional snort or bray from the children’s corner.

  A ring at the door. I answered it. Helena joined me. She had a look on her face I recognised. She was beginning to enjoy the melodrama. Polly hurried back in, apologising but not illuminating. Then, ignoring us, Rex walked through the open door and the subsequent whispering row gave us a better clue. Rex had been betrayed. It seemed by Polly. His best friend Jack was probably the other betrayer. But still nothing was explained. We watched the drama: silent spectators. Eventually the girls joined our mothers and us just as Jack came back in and began to cry. He sat on the upstairs sofa and sobbed some sort of confession, told us all how sorry he was. He had a mug of coffee and another glass of wine. Helena patted him on the back and made comforting sounds. Suddenly Rex came in, saw Jack, and left, slamming the door. He returned in a few minutes, indicating an afterthought on his way to Princedale Road. He and Jack then had some drunken words. Jack put out a pale, quivering hand which Rex refused to take.

  Jack got up and unsteadily made for the front door, still weeping and asking for forgiveness. We heard it open and close behind him. I wondered if I shouldn’t go after him. Helena shook her head. He would probably be all right on Boxing Day. She found a bottle of claret and poured herself a glass, leaning back on the sofa.

  About five minutes later Polly came in, a look of concern on her large, gorgeous face. She was afraid Jack really did intend to kill himself, as he’d indicated through his snuffles. Should she go to him? Enthusiastically, we sent her after her lover. She, too, departed through the front door. Another pause and Rex decided that he had better go to make sure Jack was okay. A little later Rex returned, apparently to use the toilet. Soon he could be heard vomiting downstairs. I was grateful we had not yet gone on to the old Hine cognac which I’d been looking forward to for several months and didn’t want to waste. I was wondering if I could possibly sneak it off the sideboard and secrete it away somewhere until New Year’s Eve.

  Now Mrs Denham became as vociferous as she normally did about this time. Except instead of attacking her daughter, son or grandchildren, she wanted to know ‘exactly what’ had got into Rex and company. ‘Aren’t they Catholics?’ she asked, introducing another prejudice so far unaired. Emerging from the bathroom, Rex declared, with elaborate courtesy rather spoiled by his intense, arsenical pallor and the vomit on his tie, that he was extremely sorry and would explain. Then a phone call from Princedale Road caused him to put off the moment. He announced with a gasp worthy of Garrick that Jack had attempted to kill himself.

  So this time I accompanied Rex round to Princedale Road where Jack was sprawled in their bathroom having just thrown up his bottle of sleeping pills. Polly was crying. I remember noticing how large her tears were as they fell off her nose into a wad of damp Kleenex. It was, she told me, all her fault. I hadn’t heard so many mea culpas since Helena had dropped and smashed a bottle of spaghetti sauce at Sainsbury’s. I simply couldn’t share what I saw as my friends’ overreaction. Rex to
ld me as icily as he could that Jack had betrayed their friendship. He was always a ‘backdoor man’. He’d been having an affair with Polly. Polly acknowledged this. She said the affair had happened only because Rex ‘like an idiot’ had decided to keep himself pure until their wedding night.

  Rex was embarrassed by this. Having warned me to guard my own marriage, he became inarticulate and left, presumably to return to Ladbroke Grove. A phone call from Helena confirmed that Rex had, indeed, come back. He had wandered into the girls’ room and had fallen asleep in Sally’s bed. Sally was complaining bitterly about not being able to get into her bed. Of course, she had no intention of going to sleep at all if she could get away with it. Time I went home.

  Polly cried on my shoulder and asked me if Rex hated her. He probably did just then. She didn’t dare, she said, leave Jack in that condition. By now he was also sleeping. So I plodded home to Ladbroke Grove.

  When I got back Mrs Denham had her coat on. She stood in the hall on our mustard-coloured carpet and darkly demanded a taxi while managing somehow to judge her daughter as the cause of all the chaos. She couldn’t, she said, stand it a moment longer. I reported what I’d discovered about Jack’s affair with Polly and went downstairs to get a cup of tea. While I filled the kettle Rex began to shout incoherently from Sally’s bed before falling backwards into our little girl’s pillows and snoring with impressive volume. Sally meanwhile had given up negotiation for a while and was sitting in the corner with my mum watching the seasonal fun on our dilapidated black and white TV. I phoned the only taxi rank I knew, the cabman’s shelter at Notting Hill. Surprisingly a cab was ready. Two minutes. Suddenly he had materialised outside our front steps.

  Naturally Mrs Denham was frozen by a human desire to learn what happened next. She hovered between the taxi and the living room until her daughter, taking her firmly to the outside door, got her down the steps to the street. Here the taxi murmured and grumbled to itself, waiting for the expensive fare to Norbury, in South London, on the other side of the river. Considering the cost, Mrs Denham wondered, perhaps we should cancel it. I went out, shoved a bunch of fivers into the contemplative driver’s hand to keep him long enough so we could get Mrs D, her various presents, massive handbag and some sewing patterns she’d brought for unknown purposes down into the seats of the cab and on her way to Pollards Hill.

  The following year Rex at last discovered he was gay on a poetry tour organised by the Poetry Society which put him together with the notorious bisexual junky Lin Carwood (‘man, woman or dog, I just throw ’em on a bed’). Only Rex was surprised. He stopped trying to marry some puzzled woman and his relationship with Polly and Jack improved. Jack took up with Ellen Voight, the gin heiress, and lived with her as a kind of pet in her big Chelsea house. Polly married Gordon Perry, who did the Fix’s light show. They eventually moved back to the States and put on mixed-media festivals underwritten by Polly’s millionaire dad. She almost stopped painting entirely. Her father once asked me what was the best thing he could do for her as a painter. ‘Do you really want to know?’ I asked him. He did. ‘Then cut her off without a penny,’ I said. This idea appealed to him but he couldn’t bring himself to put it into practise. Polly never did develop her talent.

  The year 1967 came with more plans for the new style New Worlds. Allard drove over with his kids on New Year’s Day. Helena thought we should go up to the pub together. He had become rather sad and a little erratic since his wife Milly’s death, even though I had introduced him to a new woman he liked, Cathy White. Cathy had briefly been my girlfriend and didn’t much like coming over on these family things. Helena said she’d look after his kids while Jack and I went up to the Hennekey’s for a drink. His spirits seemed to rise when he talked about the magazine and he fired off a whole lot of ideas, most of which didn’t really suit what we wanted to do, yet at the same time I saw him as the soul of the magazine. His were the stories I ran as exemplary. Cathy said he was jealous of me, but I couldn’t see it. I never could.

  Jack’s career was moving him into a different direction and he was seeing more of a mutual friend, Malcolm Bix, a regular of John Brunner’s ‘at homes’. He ran a little magazine, ajax, and shared some of our contributors, such as George MacBeth and D.M. Thomas. We had always been wary of little magazines, but they asked Jack to be prose editor and, disappointed that I didn’t let him decide the contents of the magazine, he accepted. He liked their willingness to give him his head.

  Jack hated the first cover we did by Escher. He thought it should be Dali. I pointed out that Dali or Dali-esque artwork had been appearing on covers for years and Escher was less familiar to readers. We were after all a newsstand magazine with a general readership. The Escher I had selected for the cover appealed to a wide audience. I told Jack he had only his own career to think about. I had a lot of careers to worry about. Jack did do a good story for the first issue, however, along with Fisch, Slade, Zelazny, MacBeth, Aldiss, Masson, Zee, and Platt. Dr Christopher Evans, our own tame mad scientist, wrote a feature on computers, sleep and dreams. It was a great issue, featuring some of our best writers, and the general press gave us a generous reception. We doubled our circulation. When it came out I, of course, was already working on the fourth issue. For a few great months everything seemed to be going our way. A good many established literary writers were submitting work and I found myself in a rather uncomfortable position of power.

  Although I had written The Final Programme, I was still not sure I had found exactly the tone I needed for the work I wanted to do, which would deal with identity and the modern city. I had written some well-received SF novels but nothing really stretched me. I began another series of Meg Midnight stories, setting aside some of the money to pay New Worlds contributors until we received income on the first issues. Most of the AP earnings were needed for our growing expenses as a family. I still found myself writing features because Helena became pregnant again. Three children so close together would break the bank and exhaust her. You could get an abortion at that time if a psychiatrist said your mental health would suffer. Doctors who performed abortions usually told you which psychiatrist to go to. We discovered that, once you had a baby, the abortion option was much harder to accept. I had the ‘new baby’ visualised, even named. Nothing morbid about it. It simply happened. It was hard for both of us.

  After a very depressing time of it, Helena at least came away from Harley Street with a new coil, an effective birth control method which did not depend on my clumsiness or our erratic memories. I was depressed and puzzled because for some reason, I suddenly developed a strong desire to visit the Alsacia. After delivering a feature to Ted Holmes at Look and Learn, I found myself wandering around Carmelite Inn Chambers, looking for the gates. But I had no luck. I was relieved, later, when I sat on top of the 15 bus going home. I felt obscurely guilty and said nothing to Helena, though she sensed my secret. The business of running a new magazine soon drove thoughts of the Alsacia away.

  We had fallen in love with our Ladbroke Grove flat. The noise from the traffic at the front was impersonal and at the back, with the big gardens, it was often tranquil. Helena was much happier and, because of the gardens, the children didn’t require our complete attention. But I needed to earn more and help keep an ambitious magazine going until we started getting income. I became busier than I liked. My anxiety had begun to manifest itself in bouts of bad temper. I never attacked anyone physically of course, but I could become, briefly, a roaring monster with my friends or Helena. I wouldn’t have blamed Helena if she’d left me. Of course I experienced the usual guilt but I wasn’t happy with myself and wanted to change without quite knowing how. Helena would occasionally take the kids out to give me the space I was demanding but it didn’t help much. I still felt abandoned. I saw a shrink up at St Charles Hospital but all he did was prescribe Valium, tell me to drink Guinness and warned me that if I smoked marijuana I should be careful because dealers cut it with cocaine. I left his surgery wondering if everyon
e in his profession was as ill informed. To work I had to pull myself together but I was growing increasingly melancholy. Helena had plenty of ideas about what was wrong with me, but her theories seemed no better than mine.

  Helena and the kids had gone out one warm, early summer afternoon. I think it must have been early closing day, obeying that benign law which insisted on a shop assistant’s half holiday midweek, before Thatcher smashed protectionism and gave us freedom to choose between a rock and a hard place. The sound of traffic dropped almost to nothing on those lazy afternoons. The whole city grew drowsy. I had taken a break from the typewriter to stretch my legs, going downstairs through the kids’ room, inching my way between the pianola and a toy castle, round the vast rocking horse we had bought from Hamleys during a flush period, and walking out into our little patch of ratty green garden with its orange brick walls, its briar roses sturdily climbing their makeshift trellises. On the warm, dusty air came distant sounds of adults and children playing in the gardens on the other side of the wall. The air, carrying the scent of roses and car exhaust, was a perfect mixture of town and country. I felt pleasantly alone. Relaxed, I lit a spliff.

  I was enjoying the moment when a large black bird hopped on top of the red brick wall, put its beautiful black head on one side, fixed me with a sardonic jet-black eye and croaked, ‘Hello.’