Hearing secret harmonies (5 page)

Ariosto’s Time (a writer’s Time) is far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless. The English duke watched Ariosto’s Time at work. The naked ancient, in an eternally breathless scramble with himself, collected from the Fates small metal tablets (one pictured them like the trinkets hanging from the necks of Murtlock and Henderson), then moved off at the double to dump these identity discs in the waters of Oblivion. A few of them (like Murtlock’s medallion at the pond) were only momentarily submerged, being fished out, and borne away to the Temple of Fame, by a pair of well disposed swans. The rest sank to the bottom, where they were likely to remain.

On the strength of this not too obscure allegory, I decided to go to bed. Just before I closed the book, my eye was caught by a stanza in an earlier sequence.

And as we see straunge cranes are woont to do,
First stalke a while er they their wings can find,
Then soare from ground not past a yard or two,
Till in their wings they gather’d have the wind,
At last they mount the very clouds unto,
Triangle wise according to their kind:
So by degrees this Mage begins to flye,
The bird of
Jove
can hardly mount so hye;
And when he sees his time and thinks it best,
He falleth downe like lead in fearfull guise,
Even as the fawlcon doth the foule arrest,
The ducke and mallard from the brooke that rise.

The warm windy afternoon, cottonwool clouds, ankle-deep wild garlic, rankness of fox, laboratory exhalations from the quarry, parade ground evolutions of the duck, hawk’s precipitate flight towards the pool, all were suddenly recreated. Duck, of course, rather than cranes, had risen ‘triangle wise’, but the hawk, as in Ariosto’s lines (or rather Harington’s), had hung pensively in the air, then swooped to strike. I tried to rationalize to myself this coincidental passage. There was nothing at all unusual in mallard getting up from the water at that time of day, nor a kestrel hovering over the neighbouring meadows. For that matter, reference to falconry in a Renaissance poem was far from remarkable. Something in addition to all that held the attention. It was the word Mage. Mage carried matters a stage further.

Mage summoned up the image of Dr Trelawney, a mage if ever there was one. I thought of the days when, as a child, I used to watch the Doctor and his young disciples, some of them no more than children themselves, trotting past the Stonehurst gate on their way to rhythmical callisthenics – whatever the exercises were – on the adjacent expanse of heather. In those days (brink of the first war) Dr Trelawney was still building up a career. He had not yet fully transformed himself into the man of mystery, the thaumaturge, he was in due course to become. The true surname was always in doubt (Grubb or Tibbs, put forward by Moreland), anyway something with less body to it than Trelawney. In his avatar of the Stonehurst period he had been less concerned with the predominantly occult engagement of later years; then seeking The Way (to use his own phrase) through appropriate meditations, exercises, diet, apparel.

Once a week Dr Trelawney and his neophytes would jog down the pine-bordered lane from which our Indian-type bungalow was set a short distance back. The situation was remote, a wide deserted common next door. Dr Trelawney himself would be leading, dark locks flowing to the shoulder, biblical beard, grecian tunic, thonged sandals. The Doctor’s robe (like the undefiled of Sardis) was white, somewhat longer and less diaphanous than the single garment – identical for both sexes and all weathers – worn by the disciples, tunics tinted in the pastel shades fashionable at that epoch. People who encountered Dr Trelawney by chance in the village post-office received an invariable greeting:

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.

‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’

One of the firmest tenets – so Moreland always said – in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than ‘magic in action’. There had just been an example of that.
Orlando Furioso
had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney’s were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that – with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life – a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney’s view – also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh – that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as ‘dead’, there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the ‘liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies’. Perhaps Vaughan’s words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls’ T-shirts.

In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if – like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh – somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the subject of the all-but-forgotten novelist, St John Clarke.

Above all others, St John Clarke might be judged, critically speaking, as gone for good. Not a bit of it. Here was a consummate instance of a lost reputation – in this case a literary one – salvaged from the Moon, St John Clarke’s Astolpho being Ada Leintwardine. Keen on transvestism, Ariosto would have found nothing incongruous in a woman playing the part of the English duke. Maidens clad in armour abound throughout the poem. Ada Leintwardine, as a successful novelist married to the well-known publisher, J. G. Quiggin, could be accepted as a perfectly concordant Ariosto character. In any case she had latterly been taking an increasingly executive part in forming the policy of the firm of which her husband was chairman. Quiggin used to complain that St John Clarke’s novels (all come finally to rest under his firm’s imprint) sold ‘just the wrong amount’, too steady a trickle to be ruthlessly disregarded, not enough comfortably to cover production costs. Nor was there compensatory prestige – rather the reverse – in having a name in the list unknown to a younger generation. In fact Quiggin himself did not deny that he was prepared to allow such backnumbers to fall out of print. Ada, on the other hand, would not countenance that. Her reasons were not wholly commercial; not commercial, that is, on the short-term basis of her husband’s approach.

Ada’s goal was to have a St John Clarke novel turned into a film. This had become almost an obsession with her. Ten years before she had failed – she alleged by a hair’s breadth – to persuade Louis Glober to make a picture of
Match Me Such Marvel
, and, after Glober’s death, vigorous canvassing of other film producers, American or British, had been no less fruitless. Meanwhile, St John Clarke’s literary shares continued to slump. Ada, though she made fairly frequent appearances on television, had not herself produced a novel for some years. Remaining preoccupied with the St John Clarke project, she at last achieved the small advance in her plans that a television programme should be made about the novelist’s life and work. This she regarded as a start, something to prepare the ground for later adaptation of one of the books.

Even their old friend, Mark Members, agreed that the Quiggins’ marriage, whatever its ups and downs, had been on the whole a success. Members, who had no children himself, used to laugh at the disparity between Quiggin’s former views on rebellion, and present attitude towards his twin daughters, Amanda and Belinda, now of university age and troublemakers. Quiggin’s grumbling on that subject usually took place when Ada was not about. One of the twins had recently been concerned (only as a witness) in a drug prosecution; the other, about the same time, charged (later acquitted) with kicking a policeman. Quiggin was less reconciled to that sort of thing than, say, Roddy Cutts in relation to Fiona’s caprices. In business matters the Quiggins got on well together too, showed a united front. It was the exception that there should be disagreement about St John Clarke.

Quiggin was doubtful as to the wisdom of propagating the novelist’s name at this late stage. He feared that a small temporary increase in demand for the books would merely add to his own embarrassments as their publisher. His objection did not hold out very long. In due course Ada had her way. She seems to have brought about her husband’s conversion to the idea by pointing out that he himself, as former secretary of St John Clarke, would play a comparatively prominent part in any documentary produced. Quiggin finally gave in at one of their literary dinner parties, choosing the moment after his wife had produced an aphorism.

‘The television of the body brings the sales everlasting.’

Quiggin bowed his head.

‘Amen, then. I resign St John Clarke to the makers of all things televisible.’

As a fellow ex-secretary of St John Clarke, Members would also have to be included in any programme about the novelist. That was no great matter. Members and Quiggin had been on goodish terms now for years, even admitting the kinship (second-cousins apparently), always alleged by Sillery, nowadays disputing with each other only who had enjoyed the more modest home. Both had come to look rather distinguished, Quiggin’s dome-like forehead, sparse hair, huge ears, gave him a touch of grotesquerie, not out of place in a prominent publisher. Members, his white hair worn long, face pale and lined, had returned to the Romantic Movement overtones of undergraduate days. His air was that of an eighteenth-century sage too highminded to wear a wig – Blake, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Encyclopaedists – suitable image for a figure of his eminence in the cultural world. When in London, his American wife, Lenore, fell in with this historical mood, doing so with easy assurance. They remained married, though Lenore spent increasingly long spells in her own country, an arrangement that seemed to suit both of them.

A graver problem than Members, in relation to the St John Clarke programme, was Vernon Gainsborough – now generally styled Dr Gainsborough, as holding an academic post in political theory – who (under his original name of Wernher Guggenbühl) had as a young man, finally displaced both Members and Quiggin in St John Clarke’s employment. Quiggin (in those days writing letters to the papers in defence of the Stalinist purges) used to complain that Guggenbiihl (as he then was) had perverted St John Clarke to Trotskyism. Some sort of a rapprochement had taken place after the war, when the firm of Quiggin & Craggs had published the recantation of Gainsborough (as he had become) in his study
Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?
Gainsborough could not, therefore, be omitted from the programme. The only other performer who had known St John Clarke in the flesh was L. O. Salvidge, the critic. In his early days, when in low water, Salvidge had done some devilling, when St John Clarke was without a secretary, collecting French Revolution material for
Dust Thou Art
. The cast was made up with several self-constituted friends of the deceased novelist, professional extras, who appeared in all such literary resuscitations on the TV screen.

Isobel and I watched this rescue job from the Valley of Lost Things, to which another small item was added by the opening shot, St John Clarke’s portrait (butterfly collar, floppy bow tie), painted by his old friend, Horace Isbister, RA. A few minutes later, Isbister’s name appeared again, this time in an altogether unexpected connexion, only indirectly related to painting.

For some years now fashion had inclined to emphasize, rather than overlook, the sexual habits of the dead. To unearth anything about a man so discreet as St John Clarke had proved impossible, but Salvidge ventured to put forward the possibility that the novelist’s ‘fabulous parsimony’ had its origins in repressed homosexuality. Members then let off a mild bombshell. He suggested that the friendship with Isbister had been a homosexual one. The contention of Members was that the central figure in an early genre picture of Isbister’s –
Clergyman eating an apple
– was not at all unlike St John Clarke himself as a young man, Members advancing the theory that Isbister could have possessed a fetishist taste for male lovers dressed in ecclesiastical costume.

Quiggin questioned this possibility on grounds that Isbister had finally married his often painted model, Morwenna. Members replied that Morwenna was a lesbian. Gainsborough – who had never heard of Morwenna, and found some difficulty with the name – attempted to shift the discussion to St John Clarke’s politics. He was unsuccessful. Something of an argument ensued, Gainsborough’s German accent thickening, as he became more irritable. St John Clarke, rather a prudish man in conversation, would have been startled to hear much surmised, before so large an audience, on the subject of his sexual tastes. It was not a very exciting forty minutes, of which Ada was to be judged the star. Isbister’s portrait of his friend – perhaps more than friend – flashed on the screen again as finale.