The Whispering Swarm

by Michael Moorcock

  We probably saw a few too many Disney movies, but we also went to the National Film Theatre and other places to see silent films. They sat rapt through two and a half hours of Douglas Fairbanks spectaculars like The Black Pirate or The Gaucho. He wasn’t the acrobat his father was, but he was an excellent cloak-and-dagger performer in his own right, could flash a devilish smile, and was superb in The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Colman.

  As a boy I enjoyed the old prewar story papers from the years before I was born. Now my children went to see black-and-white silent epics with title cards and piano accompaniment. In the cinema I would see other parents trying to control much older kids through Robin Hood, starring Fairbanks Sr. It did have some early longueurs, but my kids sat entranced, knowing how to watch. You grow greedy for such memories, for the experiences of earlier generations. I hoped I was teaching important lessons, widening their range of pleasure. Experience and a broad vocabulary always seemed worth cultivating.

  After a month of exile I tried to open negotiations with Helena about coming back or at least talking. In spite of passionate denials, she was convinced I was still seeing Molly and she wouldn’t allow me to raise the topic. How could I blame her? I still felt the pain of Molly’s betrayal. I had trusted her, as Helena had trusted me, so I knew exactly how my wife was feeling. I was in a moral limbo, horribly frustrated by the situation, and with no intention of taking up with Molly again. I wanted my family life back and absolutely nothing more. I wrote Helena letters promising this. I did get a response eventually. ‘Don’t waste your time,’ said Helena. ‘I always knew you would do this.’

  As Christmas came round I recalled an idea I had planned earlier to save everyone stress. It would not involve Helena having to cook for me if I wanted to spend the holiday with the children. The Christmas at the Café Royal idea originally occurred when I realised we all needed a break from preparing the season’s rituals. Recent events aside, the idea was still a good one. I proposed to take us all out for Christmas lunch at the Café Royal. And I thought I’d invite Pete Pavli since he’d just split up with Fiona and we were a bit top-heavy with women. The girls were old enough to enjoy the change and I was pretty sure Helena’s mother would love it. Mrs Denham would be frustrated from expressing her firm ideas about how, what, when and why her daughter was cooking. Mrs Denham took the rituals seriously, down to watching (and criticising) the Queen’s Speech which Helena and I tried to avoid. My mum didn’t actually get on with the others much but agreed. So I booked us a big table, decided the wines, agreed to the menu and looked forward to a good time, at least for a few hours, where everyone could sit back and relax without worrying about what was due to go in and come out of the oven when.

  Even when Helena asked if Molly and her mother were coming I didn’t rise to the bait. I hadn’t contacted them, nor did I plan to contact them. Seeing a way of avoiding a lot of holiday awkwardness, Helena agreed. So early Christmas morning saw me climbing into a posh scarlet-and-white Santa suit and whiskers from Harrods, haring across Ladbroke Grove with a sackful of good stuff and ho-ho-hoing like buggery as I distributed presents to everyone. In the taxis I’d booked, we all bundled off to Regent Street late on Christmas morning. Dashing through the near-deserted streets, we arrived at the Café Royal in time for a lunch which, if not up to homemade, was pretty splendid, enjoyed by all, especially a bunch of carol-singing waiters. Champagne sparkled, claret gushed. The other diners were mainly rather sad American couples who were only too happy to join in a day with kids, confusion, carols, paper hats and plenty of high-class presents bursting from the crackers. I sat on one side of Mrs D and Pete sat on the other. Our job was to jolly the lady up and keep her from discovering fresh seasonal sins in her daughter. This gave me a good view of the man lunching alone across the aisle who was clearly trying to work out our relationships. I felt we should do our best to put on a good show for him.

  That year I saw the fault lines in our family life as clearly as I ever had. Nonetheless, I was determined to make this as jolly, glittery, plush, traditional and memorable a Christmas festival as it was possible to enjoy. Thankfully, everyone was equally sporting and had fun. Even Mrs D, taking her cue from my mum, put on the elaborate, sturdy paper hats and comic masks and pulled the enormous crackers and read out the witty mottoes and marvelled at the glorious gifts. Even Pete, not a natural diplomat, did his best to charm Mrs D, who knew what he was up to but acquiesced to be charmed anyway.

  It was dark when we left the restaurant. The taxis were waiting for us. My mum and Mrs D went home on their own. Helena, the girls and I all rode in the same cab to Ladbroke Grove. Helena invited me to stay the night.

  ‘I’m not saying this changes anything,’ she said.

  36

  STOLEN BREATH

  Pete Pavli stayed on our couch and was still there for a bit on Boxing Day. Back across the road I told him what had happened and asked him what he thought it meant. ‘Probably means she’s going to divorce you,’ he said with that deadpan look which had got him flattened more than once. But I had a feeling he was right. I was beginning to think Helena had her eye on someone else.

  We smoked some dope and went over a couple of numbers. He had a habit of composing tunes that were almost unsingable and required some serious vocal gymnastics. I could make the range but came out sounding like a second-rate operatic tenor. The times had made us overconfident. We were slowly realising that the pop world wasn’t ready for Schoenberg-inspired rock songs. We had a gig at Dingwalls in a few days. I decided to focus on that. And we’d keep it simple. No messing about with weird key changes and time signatures. Like most of my friends, Pete was a natural sceptic. Probably because he had been in two of the most infamous stoner bands of all time—High Tide and The Third Ear—Pete was no longer inclined to speculate about God and the universe. Dope inspired him to suggest we find something to eat. We got our rehearsals done and staggered round to Mountain Grill Café in Portobello Road for a fry-up.

  The gig went pretty well. We didn’t actually perform the new stuff because Adrian Shaw, our bass player, hadn’t had a chance to learn it. He’d been on holiday in Wales.

  I met an old friend at Dingwalls, Lou Willis. A friend of Christina’s. A beautiful natural-blonde, peaches-and-cream Welsh girl. She had just broken up with her bloke, Tank, a talented loony who mainly did session drums. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever known and I’d fancied her for years. We had never been lovers, mostly because our periods of promiscuity never coincided. Now Lou felt like going home with me. I knew in my bones it wasn’t quite right. But I was curious. She knew Helena slightly. Had Helena told her I was fair game? In which case Helena really did have plans for seeing someone else. If I slept with Lou I’d probably find out. But it seemed wrong in so many ways. Unsporting! Ridiculous! In the end Lou came round for some coffee and we had one of those conversations about how stupid it would be for us to sleep together. I did my best not to let her perfume distract me, but was about to make a move, when she remembered that I’d once read the tarot cards. Did I still do that?

  I should have kept to my own pledge and put the cards away for good. I’d sworn never to drag them out again. But reading them would keep my other pledge and distract my mind from sex. First I did a simple three-card spread—past, present and future—which I placed at the centre around which I made other spreads, gypsy-style or, as my auntie Bridge used to say ‘Mitcham fashion’, for the gypsies had many ways of reading the cards. Wands. Nines and eights with twelve as the signifier and myself as the Fool. I began to lay out the next spread, letting my head get into it, setting my mind free to range over what someone had called the psychosphere, to interpret what the cards were telling me. Swords. Twelves and tens with nine as the signifier, Helena as the Queen.

  My personal card, the Fool, turned up in all three first hands. This was important news to a tarot reader. The card was identified with the reader, with myself. The Fool was God’s own, whose intuitions wer
e interpreted through the wisdom of the cards. Lou was leaning closer and I knew the part the cards would play no matter what they actually said. It might have ended up in the usual way if Helena hadn’t rung from across the road to know if I was okay. I heard someone grumbling in the background, then Helena put the kids on and we had one of those conversations you have when you don’t really have a lot to talk about. Had Helena seen Lou come back with me? I asked her to phone me later. After another half hour or so, Lou laid her dope and some rolling papers on the edge of the table, then kissed me lightly on the cheek before going down to the kitchen to make coffee.

  The tarot cards were still on the low marble table. I turned the middle card. The Lovers. That would have done the trick. I hardly looked at the other cards as I wondered what I should do. Lou came back with the coffee. And suddenly I was explaining my situation to Lou.

  When I had finished Lou smiled quietly as she rolled another joint. ‘Are you sure she’s really telling you everything?’ Her perfume had started to work on me, mingling perfectly with the hash. I said nothing. I don’t think I wanted to know. I’ve often wondered how my life would have panned out if Lou and I had made love that night. Maybe spent the next few days together. I knew ahead of time how it would make me feel, of course.

  Lou was so incredibly lovely. I didn’t know what it was about her that moved me most. Her beautiful, soft skin, her long lashes, all complemented her beauty. Lou and I could easily have fallen in love over time, but we didn’t have any time. If we had made love that night, Lou would have told me some more about what she guessed Helena was thinking. But Helena phoned back. Lou went home. I asked Helena if she’d mind me coming over.

  She didn’t think it was a good idea.

  I tried to persuade her. I needed her company. I needed her solace.

  Again she refused. She had other plans.

  Other plans? What could be more important? I was so used to having my own way that I hadn’t expected a refusal. Sometimes I had to fight a little to get what I wanted, but I always got it. Sons of single mothers generally have that advantage. Helena never accused me, but to my own astonishment, I behaved like a spoiled boy. Stoned, lonely and brooding, I determined that Helena didn’t want or deserve my loyalty. How could she pretend she loved me, I asked irrationally, and refuse me her time? She was no better than Molly. I had become a monster of self-pity. Well, if she felt like that, I needed to take action. And I knew where I was wanted. Molly and her ma had gone to Oxford. The man I was thinking about was sure to be in the Alsacia. He had asked for my help often enough and I had refused many times. For Helena’s sake!

  I was already packing a few things and leaving. In the street I looked for a taxi. I had made a lot of decisions for Helena’s sake. Not anymore! I was furious. I’d turned down going to bed with Lou, a girl I’d been attracted to for years, on her behalf! I hailed a taxi and got in. Still stoned, I told the cabbie to drop me off at the top of Fleet Street.

  Looking back at my decisions and behaviour of that time I am not at all proud of myself. The irony only later hit me. No doubt Helena thought it should have been the iron. It didn’t occur to me how childish I was in rationalising my behaviour. Not then.

  I left the taxi at the Law Courts. Before I crossed the street I hesitated. I decided I needed to have something to eat at Mick’s. So I walked up in the general direction of St Paul’s.

  I doubt if that favourite Fleet Street all-night greasy spoon is still there. Mick’s was a regular hangout for newspaper people—printers and journos—who worked the night shift. It was an ordinary caff where you could get typical meals. Comfort food. I ordered up sausage, egg and chips twice with a mug and two slices. Bromide or something in the tea made the brew unrecognisable as any drink known to man. The legend was Mick slipped the stuff in his brass urns for the same reason they did in prisons. To keep things calm. He got a lot of drunks in at night. They said Mick learned the trick as a canteen trusty in his first British POW camp. He did well in the system. By the time the war was over he had saved enough to send home for his whole family. Mick and Mrs Mick knew me from when I’d been a steady customer, so we had a chat and a gossip. I thought the papers moving would be disastrous for his business but Mick said it had actually improved, thanks to the renovations going on everywhere around us. ‘We get a lot of men who work on the sites. What happens when they finish, I’m not sure. We might have to go a bit up market.’ I hardly recognised some of the shops or even the pubs. Floral baskets. Window boxes. They’d be putting beehives in their backyards next.

  The entire press exodus to Canary Wharf wouldn’t be for another decade or so but Fleet Street was already dying. Where the great rotary presses had thundered night and day, where copy boys rushed galley proofs from office to office, where delivery vans screamed in and out of their bays bearing the first edition or the third edition or the tenth edition, bringing the sports results faster than the BBC could broadcast them, everything took place at a more sedate speed. The Street of Ink, the Street of Shame, where tabloids vied to produce the most scandalous stories, was on its way to becoming the Street of Sobriety. The coarse vibrancy, the louche airs and graces, the pepped-up urgency of the place was fading. At least one old-fashioned pub had already become a wine bar. Maybe the boozers and cigar smokers would go somewhere else? It was hard to imagine where.

  When I got into the side streets I didn’t feel so bad. Things here had hardly changed. I even heard the occasional comforting whirr of a modern offset machine.

  Mick’s comfort food wasn’t enough to stop me heading for the Sanctuary. I was still stoned. And yet the closer I got to Carmelite Inn Chambers, the more I wondered if I wasn’t making a serious mistake. Should I have studied those tarot spreads more carefully? Something made me take them seriously. I now felt as if I had a bunch of maps in my head. I could visualise a sort of complex cat’s cradle of silvery lines, like a sort of super spaghetti-junction. I was supposed to be the Fool, but what kind of fool? I thought about the other spreads I had laid out. I remembered a preponderance of Water cards including Cups and the Hanged Man. Wands and other Water cards, too, but very few Earth and Air cards, suggesting to me at any rate that I was allowing my emotions to rule my actions. There had been only complications ahead. I had not studied the spreads sufficiently. My anger against Helena had been brief and was already dissipating. It hadn’t just been directed at Helena or Molly or her mother. I was disgusted with myself. I would put the cards away forever. I no longer had the discipline needed to read them. Not, of course, that I really believed in them.

  Then I arrived at Carmelite Inn. The evening was a fine one. The sun had yet to set. Overhead, the sky was growing gradually darker. The Inn was still unlit. The lamplighter hadn’t arrived on his bicycle. Very few windows were not dark. The place had that familiar hushed quality I had come to value in the city at weekends. Before I reached the gates I hesitated, enjoying the sense of solitude. Was I doing the right thing? I began to turn back.

  Behind me now a fog appeared to be forming. I thought of Clitch and Love. Were they in Mrs Melody’s pay and not Cromwell’s men at all? I was unprepared for another encounter with that pair.

  I took a very deep breath and, putting out my hands, pushed open the gates of Alsacia. For a strange moment the sound of the Swarm grew to a shriek in my head. I cried out in pain. Once inside the Swarm would surely stop. Was the Alsacia rejecting me? Or warning me? My movements became urgent. The Swarm subsided. Through the falling darkness I saw shivering lines of silver light, waves of colour. Series of numbers formed within my head. Pictures of tarot cards. I stepped involuntarily this way and that, in the movements of a dance. The silver network of threads remained in my head. Somewhere I heard a high, lilting flute. Duval?

  I was feeling pretty bad by now. Would it not have been better to have enjoyed a few friendly nights’ escape with Lou? Was I still worrying about that apparent miracle of resuscitation? I was more confused than I could remember. Surely so
me greater power wasn’t playing with my mind, interfering in my life? For the first time since I was a child I no longer felt reasonably in control of events. I was almost in shock!

  As best I could I pulled myself together. I relaxed and steadied my nerves. I was determined to keep an open mind and stay focused on the question in hand. I headed first for the abbey. There was just a chance the abbot could help. Could any of the monks help me? I was burdened by too many mysteries. Too many ambiguities. A writer actually trying to examine social ambiguities can be driven mad by immediate uncertainties in the surrounding world. Ambiguity certainly messed up my ability to work.