As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  As for Alexandra herself, she stomped about feeling angrily—but not wholly justifiably—that they were all making these sacrifices to please her and not out of any concern for Hamo’s proposals. Such a sense of her own power disgusted her. And, as the rain ran down her neck and the bitter wind pierced even the folds of her warm fur coat, she began to wonder what sense there was in urging this scheme at all. After all, you should act only out of conviction and knowledge. The conviction and knowledge that lay behind Hamo’s scheme had come to him from his Asian experiences—and of these experiences she knew nothing. As her faith dwindled, she shouted more loudly, “What Sir James won’t tell you,” and pressed upon the low-spirited sight-seers leaflets of extracts from Hamo’s proposals, five thousand copies of which she had had printed at her own expense.

  *

  As the silver Bentley drew near to Marlborough, Sir James pressed a further Havana cigar upon his grotesque companion. He had found the Swami’s brandy-drinking and cigar-smoking creditable rather than shocking. Only a sentimentalist would have wished that extraordinary psychic powers should prove incompatible with business astuteness and a taste for good living. Sir James was not a sentimentalist; and he admitted to himself a certain satisfaction that his own tastes and passions were reflected in this great man. He did not particularly care for the huge freckled bare shoulder that, as the car occasionally swayed, was pushed near to his gaze; nor would he have chosen to travel next to a mass of scabbed bare leg obtruding cross-kneed from a white cotton gown—but these were the man’s stock in trade, they had some traditional Eastern licence, he overlooked them, but was annoyed that they hadn’t come by the Daimler which would have given much more room between them both. What did disturb him more was a certain evasiveness in the Swami’s replies. He recognized Sir James’s psychic gifts as genuine, it seemed; thought him a likely candidate for admission to the inner circle of adepts; had no doubt that to have an adept so highly placed in the external world of financial power would accelerate the cosmic revolution to which they were both committed; thought the proposed College a useful means for the harnessing of the cosmic forces so strongly centred in Avebury; saw in their partnership a means of reaching powers and circles that, unleashed, could alter the whole human psychic condition as completely as science was altering the physical universe or medicine the human body. All this was excellent, but, whenever it came to the actual imparting of the Names or the Words, to giving the Cryptic Knowledge as well as the Conditioning Postures and Breathing, the Swami moved off into reminiscence, in which he abounded, or general astral ethical talk which Sir James found very near to sentimental rubbish.

  It was all exceedingly irritating. Then, in Marlborough’s wide but ancient high street, they came into a traffic jam caused mainly by the diversions resulting from the crowds at Avebury, but partly by the driving rain. The chauffeur was new and inexpert; he braked too often and too suddenly. Rodrigo Knight (he would have to sack him) was absent from duty that morning and Sir James felt unsure of what arrangements had been made for the evening banquet for the Swami. He had drunk and eaten too well with the old man the night before. Without Rodrigo’s organization, he had gone late to the sauna bath and his gymnastic exercises seemed to have followed too soon upon that relaxation. He felt irritated, sweaty and a little giddy as he had not done since the days of his first managing-directorships thirty years before. The Swami was in high spirits, giggling and showing his few black tusks, as he outlined his plans for the expenditure of the money Sir James was putting up for the College, or told sly stories of the sexual peccadilloes of other notable gurus.

  Suddenly Sir James said, “Yes, yes, that’s enough of all that. Now. Some plain questions. Who are the Himalayan adepts? What powers are you using to counteract their influence? You say that you are harnessing benevolent, Atlantean, psychic impulses. What form of words do you use to condition your mind to reach the plane on which they function? I shall need to know all this before we can hope to use the Atlantean cosmic sciences. We must make such powers our servants not our masters.”

  The Swami stopped in his tracks, as he was outlining the ceremonial year as he had seen it in the lives of the cosmic students. He was aghast. He had thought Sir James a somewhat autocratic man, but he had not supposed him a megalomaniac. His mind went back to his youth, to his own great master, Stefan George, to the days long before he had learnt of the Eastern or occult wisdoms, when he tramped with other Wandervögeln youth from lovely Salzburg up into the Schwarzwälder, reciting the Master’s poems. Stefan George, too, had taken the Nazis to be harmless followers, useful because of their power in the material world, and then, when they monstrously tried to use him, the old man, the great Master, had withdrawn, out of the Germany he so loved, into the Swiss Alps. So, if this Sir James really was a brutal, insane materialist, the Swami accepted that he too would have to withdraw from all the delightful prospects for his old age of an honoured and comfortable College, where the powers that used him would find their expression among the ancient and sacred places and stones of the Old Wisdom. He could not compromise. He could doubt at times how much he knew, but he always believed that he had these powers in trust.

  He said, “We do not use the powers, they use us.”

  Sir James knew a sudden access of fury at being so addressed, at having his time wasted. A sense of imperative need for immediate control of this secret power that sat so ridiculously beside him made the blood pound in his ears. He employed the peremptory tone he always adopted with recalcitrant subordinates, but he used it aware that, for once, he had no idea of its effect.

  He said, “You will give me the unspoken names and words or you don’t get a penny for this College.”

  The Swami laughed at him. “To begin with, my poor Sir James, these names can’t be communicated in speech, only telepathically, and you are not endowed to receive them. Secondly, I do as I am instructed. Thirdly, there is much that I do not know. Fourthly, if we are able to work together, it will take many months of trial and error and endurance before I can judge whether you are a worthy vessel or not.”

  Once again, he laughed in Sir James’s face so that some spittle settled on Sir James’s immaculate suit. Sir James took out a handkerchief and very deliberately wiped it away. But his hand shook violently and he had a premonition of failure.

  “I order you to tell me,” he said.

  The Swami’s mocking laugh was wholly genuine. Sir James could not believe his ears.

  “Do you understand? I am giving you an order.”

  At that moment the car came to the end of the high street and the traffic jam. It shot forward with a jolt. Sir James had a sudden, last, calming vision of the elegant formal eighteenth-century college building, then he felt a searing pain in his left arm, and a tearing of his chest, he made a choking sound, and his head fell forward. The chauffeur, with a clear road before him, put on speed. The Swami felt a little disturbed at what had happened, but not surprised; after all, the powers that acted through him were very strong. He removed his thoughts from Sir James. And as West Kennet Long Barrow’s great tumulic height came into view he felt forces, warm and powerful, filling him with pride at having proved stronger than this foolish man. But then how could it be otherwise in this country-side where the old wisdoms of which he was an adept had their sway?

  As the silver Bentley, waved on by impressed policemen, came to a halt before the Avebury circles, Alexandra looked round for her little group and realized that Rodrigo was no longer there. But there was no time to examine her feelings at the discovery. She led them all—a feeble, helpless little group—in a feeble, helpless little cry, “Read what Sir James won’t tell you. Read the truth.” But Sir James, of course, told them nothing, since he was dead. The Swami regretted that his power had been so strong at so inopportune a moment, but he assumed a look of spiritual playfulness to meet the battery of cameramen.

  *

  “To my great-nephew, Hamo Langmuir and in the event of his demise
to his heir or heirs.” Sir James had been a lonely man and, save for his megalomania, a conventionally pious one. So Alexandra passed from being a rich young woman to becoming a millionairess. Paris-Match did a piece on her; as did Dimanche-Soir, Die Stern and Oggi. David Frost thought of making a programme round her. Had she gone to New York (but she did not) her reputation as a very rich hippie might have made her the butt of William Buckley Junior’s synthetic aristocratic scorn. More devastatingly to herself, she was inundated with appeals and threats from charity, from the helpless, the hopeless, the insane and the socially desperate. These, with the help of Rodrigo (continuing, despite his defection, on the same salary as that paid by Sir James), she sorted out. Mainly—and it was hard to keep to it in the face of all the desperation that poured in upon her—she fended off all these claims until she had decided more fully what her life and her pleasures and her services should be. In this she received, against every pressure, the loyal and constant support of Rodrigo. “Ally’s not to be fussed,” he said one hundred or more times a day. Ned agreed and would have liked to be there saying it, but the whole of this very rich thing was so alarming and unnatural to him that one day, quite suddenly, he disappeared, leaving a note to say that he had returned home north.

  Among the pressures upon Alexandra’s purse were a few more intimate than others, to which she had to give longer personal consideration. Not much to Leslie’s suggestion that she should invest in a company to be formed under his direction, that would provide holidays at super-super prices in various châteaux, palaces, yachts and islands of super-super luxury and isolation. “I shouldn’t think it’s an idea that would appeal to you,” Leslie wrote, “but it appeals enormously to me and I am quite certain we’d get fifty per cent or more back on your outlay. But I don’t expect you’ll be forthcoming.” He was right. She wasn’t.

  More difficult was the scheme proposed by Perry and Erroll—a combination so completely unexpected that this in itself made it hard for her to reason about it. It seemed that Kit Coates, growing ever more swollen-headed and arbitrary, had come near to ruining Perry’s script and was far from appreciating fully Erroll’s camera potentiality. What they thought would appeal to Alexandra was the prospect of embarking upon a quite new venture, the forming of a film company, with Erroll as head cameraman, and Perry as script-writer, and a very brilliant, modest, sympathetic man, whom she would like when she met him, as director, to make—and here was the point—a film, completely new in form, novel-documentary, documentary-fiction, of what Erroll called “an ordinary chap’s waking up to how things really are”, of what Perry liked to think might be named, “the things the sahibs didn’t show them”, and of what this brilliant, modest, as yet unnamed man said could be a meta-movie; in short, the essence of the life of the Asian “hopeless”, given documentary veracity and cinematic significant form. It would be, they suggested, the most telling way in which—given that they could not, even Alexandra, for all her inherited money, could not, control the programme of the World Food Programme—they could serve Hamo’s wonderful vision. At first Alexandra favoured it as some revenge on Kit Coates for scrapping Hamo’s television appeal for the Asian hopeless as a dead duck. Then she thought that she could easily quench her disgust by sending them a large cheque and forgetting about it. But as she dwelt upon it, she became more angry. At last she replied that, one, she knew nothing of cinema, two, Hamo’s vision was his own and neither hers nor theirs, three, she thought that since Perry had devoted his life (and the lives of others) to being a novelist, he should write another novel, four, if Erroll was a talented cameraman, as she was sure he was, he should stop thinking of himself as an ordinary chap which was a most uncreditable thing to be, five, she had no idea what a meta-movie might be, but if it had anything to do with meta-novels then she didn’t wish to have anything to do with it.

  Lazing by the pool-side of Leslie’s chief Corfu hotel, Perry and Erroll, when they received her reply, both called her a bitch. Susan Nebble thought she sounded worse than that, she sounded a prig. But Leslie, though he made little of it, said, “Good for Ally.” And poor ageing Martin, who was sent each day to the market by Leslie to do the hotel haggling, was delighted when the news eventually trickled down to him.

  But what positively was Alexandra to do? Some time she spent in finding a nurse for Oliver and a house for them both. She never found the first, or, at any rate, one who satisfied her for more than a week or two; but, perhaps, this was, in great degree, because three generations of women were always lined up to take on the office, and then she was determined to spend at least three hours a day with her son herself. But the second she did acquire. A large eighteenth-century house with a garden in Highgate village. The furnishing took many months, because, although Zoe was primarily responsible, Lady Needham often interfered, and Little Mam had so many practical suggestions to make; and then, every four days or so, Alexandra would emerge from her ocean of legal documents, balance sheets and business interviews, see what was happening and countermand the whole thing. It was a blazing summer, however, and the eighteenth-century house had a very satisfactory sun-roof put in by an actress in the thirties. Here Alexandra would lie naked and oiled for the few hours a day that business allowed her, usually with Oliver, sometimes with Rodrigo, but always practising that relaxation of mind and body which the pace and complexity of modern business necessitate.

  For she had found what, for the next few years at any rate, she wished to do. It happened by chance, when the question of the first leases for offices at Langmuir House was put before her. It had never occurred to her that the whole place was not already leased out, even occupied. But, in fact, the office leases were still no more than discussions, verbal promises. From that moment, she had a continuously arduous life: first, to see that the building never should be occupied; second, to see that it should be pulled down; lastly, but the prospect seemed very distant, to build in its place a number of apartment blocks and houses of original modern design and lease them, at however great a loss, to those whose lives and work would normally bring them to that area. And, after that, well, after that, there was no end to the blocks she would seek to acquire, the pleasant dwellings she would seek to create or preserve.

  There would, of course, be an end, as the innumerable lawyers, stock-brokers, housing officials, building commissioners, G.L.C. Councillors, hard-headed but friendly men, furious associates of Sir Judas’s, aspiring young architects, and Roddy, all kept telling her. First, and this soon became apparent, the legal proceedings would outrun all Jarndyce—to put up was hard enough, to pull down what had just been put up was well-nigh impossible. Time was against her. And then the expense—legal, especially, for her many opponents were prepared to take her through every court—would be formidable. To solve the first difficulty she began by applying herself to all the legal and financial questions involved, but weeks spent poring over books and documents made her realize that she would only qualify herself for the role of Miss Flite, for the over-played stock English repertory part of the madwoman at law. She began, instead, to sort out the lawyers and the financial advisers that she could trust. She made some bad mistakes, but, in the end, she felt that she had a good team. They, because of their honesty, then urged upon her endlessly point two—when she had acquired for preservation a terrace or a side of a square, or when, say, she had bought five multiple blocks and pulled them down and replaced them by houses and flats at subsidised rents, even old Sir Judas’s great fortune would be used up. But London, she said, would be a little nearer to the unique city it could be; and, as for herself, she had no intention of being poor, or that Oliver should be, she had wealthy mother, she said, and a grandmother with considerable savings, and a great-grandmother with some capital, all of whom when they died would leave her their money. And, in any case, she was young and quite clever and could work.

  “And who are going to live in your flats and houses?” Rodrigo asked, as they rested after love-making on the roof one afternoo
n. Well, she was clear who would not.

  “And, Roddy, after all, I have made it clear to others too. It wasn’t easy, you know, to have those squatters turned out of Langmuir House by the police. You wouldn’t have liked being called a bloody bitch in five sorts of Marxist jargon. And the police and the organizers were so bloody to the squatters too. And I refused Ned . . . Ned of all people when he wanted to move his new mime group in there. Yes, even after he looked like a hurt faithful dog and admitted that he’d intended to take over for good. But I did refuse.”

  “Who are going to live in your houses then?” Rodrigo asked impatiently, “Unmarried mothers?”

  “Bad taste isn’t always funny. The people who pay for them.”

  “But profitable rents will be colossal.”