Mystical Paths (7 page)

I wanted to smash something. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry ...’ But I knew as I spoke that there was only one way of putting things right. Off I sloped to telephone my half-brother.

‘Don’t worry, Martin, I’m sure it’s quite impossible — I know how busy you are —’

‘Not too busy to help you out.’

‘I’ve refused to stay with the Fordites because they don’t understand about late-night parties, and Father said I had to stay at your flat, but since I wouldn’t dream of foisting myself on you —’

‘Foist away.’

‘— there’s no need for you to issue an invitation. I just have to tell Father, you see, that I’ve approached you but you can’t help. Okay, Martin, sorry to have troubled you, ‘bye.’

I then phoned Charley-the-Prig Ashworth, who had been ordained that summer and was now working at St Mary’s church in Mayfair.

‘I hate to make demands on your Christian charity, Charley,’ I said, ‘but can I sleep on your floor on Saturday week?’

‘Of course you can! I admit it
is
a little tricky because we’ll have four student Christians from Africa staying in the curates’ flat then, but I’m sure we can find you a quiet corner somewhere –’

I didn’t fancy student Christians from anywhere. ‘It’s okay, Charley, I’ll try Michael.’ I could always insist to my father that Michael had turned over a new leaf.

‘I don’t think you’d be terribly welcome there, old chap. He’s got a new girlfriend who always seems to be around to answer the phone. Talks with an American accent and sounds as if she can’t wait to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain.’

‘Gosh, not Dinkie!’

‘You know her?’ Charley was suddenly very cool.

‘She’s a friend of Marina Markhampton’s.’

‘Honestly, Nick, I think you ought to watch it – that’s a very fast crowd. Look, come and stay at the flat – you can have my bed. I’ll kip down with the Africans in the living-room.’

The thought of being ‘saved’ by this evangelical crusader of unimpeachable virtue was enough to make me want to puke.

‘No, don’t worry, Charley, I’ll go to the Fordites.’ I phoned Martin again. ‘Sorry to keep bothering you, but –’

‘– but the old man’s putting on his crucified look and you’re at your wits’ end.’

‘Don’t you speak of my father like that!’ I yelled, finally driven to the luxury of venting my rage.

‘He’s my father too, you know! Look, sonny, I don’t know what your problem is, but –’

‘Stop talking to me as if I was six!’

‘Then stop behaving as if you were two! I’ll see you on Saturday week – let me know what time you’ll be arriving,’ said Martin, and hung up.

I decided I loathed everyone over thirty. Then I remembered Christian and amended thirty to forty. After that decision I found myself wondering how Michael had managed to convert Dinkie into his live-in telephone receptionist. Did his father know? And what could the Bishop have said once he had recovered from his apoplectic fit? Was it possible that Michael could pass Dinkie off as a ‘nice girl’ and take her home to the South Canonry for visits? But no, Dinkie couldn’t be passed off as anything but a siren, and Uncle Charles, being a man of the world, would recognise her type even at a distance of fifty paces. Surely Michael wouldn’t dare tell his father! But how could he be sure Charley-the-Prig wouldn’t split on him? And I thought
I
had problems, scrabbling around once a week with Lynda! It was consoling to know that some sons of priests lived even more dangerously than I did.

For a second I remembered my premonition that Dinkie would wind up as a walking corpse, but I blotted that memory right out by repeating my father’s familiar words of comfort: ‘There are many futures and not all of them come true.’ I had long since decided that Christian wasn’t going to die young. That particular premonition had been just a false blip on the screen, a stress reaction after the exceptionally gruesome psychic experience I had suffered minutes earlier.

I began to look forward to seeing him again at Perry’s party.

II

My father said I had to take Martin a small present to signal my thanks for his hospitality so I bought some oranges from a barrow-boy at Waterloo station. Martin, a reformed alcoholic, regarded freshly-squeezed orange juice as a big treat. When I arrived at his flat in Chelsea he had just returned from a rehearsal at the theatre. A revival of Noel Coward’s
Present
Laughter
was due to open in the West End shortly after a successful trial run in the provinces. My father and I had seen the production at the Starbridge Playhouse.

‘Oranges!’ exclaimed Martin as I mutely shoved the bag at him. ‘How clever of you!’

I tramped along behind him into the spare bedroom where the wallpaper, curtains and bedspread all matched. The whole flat had this same manicured, expensive look, conjuring up images of a high-class tart. In the living-room middle-brow books sat on white shelves. Nasty examples of modem art leered from the walls. Signed photographs of show-business luminaries, all professing undying love, were positioned at various strategic points so that it was impossible to look anywhere without seeing a famous face who allegedly adored Martin. Below the middle-brow books were the middle-brow records where the noises of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peggy Lee were lavishly represented. The current copy of
Variety
lay open on the coffee table. On the desk were scattered provincial press cuttings, all proclaiming how wonderful Martin was in
Present
Laughter.
I wandered around feeling like a creature from another planet and tried to work out how I could stay in my bedroom till it was time to go to the party.

‘Can I have a bath?’ I said in a moment of inspiration.

I soaked and I soaked and I soaked. Eventually Martin called: ‘You haven’t drowned, have you?’ and I had to get out. When I finally reappeared, dressed in my best jeans and my favourite blue shirt, Martin said: ‘A casual party, is it? Whereabouts do you have to go?’

‘Albany.’

This impressed him. Martin, whose mother had been working-class, was a snob. ‘You mean
the
Albany? Off Piccadilly?’

‘You don’t say "the" Albany. That’s not done. You just say "Albany",’ I said, very much the son of Anne Darrow, née Barton-Woods, of Starrington Manor.

What’s good enough for Oscar Wilde is good enough for me, you little snob — look up the reference in
The Importance of being Earnest!
Who’s your host?’

‘A guy called Perry Palmer.’

‘
Perry Palmer?
’
Martin’s face, trained to express every conceivable emotion to every conceivable degree, now registered a profound astonishment. What are you doing going to one of Perry’s parties?’

I was equally astonished. ‘You know him?’

‘Not well, no, but we’ve friends in common — friends in the theatre. How on earth did the two of you meet?’

‘He’s a friend of Christian Aysgarth’s.’

‘Ah yes, the Starbridge connection — all is explained. But nevertheless, how extraordinary! If I were on stage I’d declare in my best sinister voice: "It’s a small world!" and a shiver would sweep through the audience!’

I experienced a moment of amnesia, as so often happens when one’s confused. ‘Have you met any of the Aysgarths?’

‘Almost the whole damned lot, yes — don’t you remember me telling you? When
Present Laughter
played in Starbridge recently Dean Aysgarth and that fantastically bizarre wife of his gave a party for the cast.’

‘So they did, I remember now. And Christian was there, wasn’t he — he came down specially from Oxford —’

‘And Perry came down specially from London. Tell me, who else is going to this party of his tonight?’

‘Oh, various people I know.’

‘Girls?’

‘You bet.’

‘Thank God!’ said Martin. ‘For one ghastly moment I thought I’d have to come to Albany to chaperone you, and all I want to do after that rehearsal is put my feet up and watch the box.’

‘Are you trying to tell me —’

‘Perry moves in certain circles, yes. God, what a relief it is to live like a monk! I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but when one gets to the advanced age of fifty-eight, the thought of performing in bed as well as on the stage is simply too exhausting to contemplate, and now I find I’m hopelessly hooked on the delights of living alone.’ He laughed before adding: ‘Getting like Dad, aren’t I? No wonder he’s decided I’m a fit person to keep an eye on you when you come trundling up to London! I’ve even started to go to church. They do a first-class show at St Mary’s Bourne Street – brilliant stagecraft enhanced by the English lust for ceremonial! I’m wild about the whole gorgeous circus.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That type of Anglo-Catholic ritualism has always appealed to people like you.’ I stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Well, watch yourself with Perry Palmer,’ said Martin smoothly as the conversation degenerated into a verbal punch-up. ‘Psychics are usually attractive to both sexes. I bet Dad’s had plenty of men in love with him in his time.’

‘The most irritating thing about homosexuals,’ I said, heading for the door, ‘is that they believe everyone’s secretly homosexual. A true triumph of hope over statistics.’

‘That’s a great exit line!’ cried Martin, genuinely amused, but I walked out without looking back.

III

I took the tube to Green Park and wandered down Piccadilly to Albany, that fabulous ex-palace where the waiting-list is about twenty years long and no one gets a ‘set’ of rooms unless they have a personal hotline to a bunch of nobs who appear to be less well-known than the Queen but more influential. How Perry had acquired this flat of his I had no idea. His grandmother was supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress, but a lot of women were supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress and presumably not all their grandsons had ended up in Albany. Anyway, there Perry lived in a ground-floor set that faced the Rope Walk, and there was I in the September of 1963 padding past the uniformed flunkey in the grand entrance hall.

Perry was a spy. Now that I had been informed that he was also a homosexual I thought: how typical! Apparently the Foreign Office had learnt nothing from the Burgess and Maclean affair. Then I remembered that it was only rumoured he was a spy; all that was known for certain was that he spoke fluent Russian and held some Foreign Office post which he refused to discuss. Possibly he just translated incoming mail from the Kremlin.

I had been bothered by Martin’s revelations about Perry, but during my journey to Albany I became less bothered and more sceptical. Martin had denied knowing Perry well. It seemed obvious in retrospect that he’d rushed to judgement after seeing Perry carousing with a certain bunch of actors, but just because Perry dabbled in the social side of the acting profession in order to give himself a break from the tight-lipped job at the F O I didn’t have to conclude he had a sex-life, lawful or unlawful. In fact Marina always said Perry was a eunuch. Perhaps he was just undersexed. Certainly I couldn’t see Christian being close friends with an active homosexual. That didn’t add up.

I rang the bell and seconds later Perry was flinging open the door. ‘Nick!’ he exclaimed, very crisp in a grey suit, white shirt and old Wykehamist tie. ‘Welcome to my orgy!’

I smiled at him warily and prowled across the threshold.

IV There were far more people present than at Marina’s Starbridge party in May. The large drawing-room was filled with cigarette-smoke and screeching voices and raucous laughter and overdressed bodies and (from the record-player) the muffled blaring of a big band, very ‘forties, very square. Funny how the vast majority of the human race has to generate a repulsive amount of noise before it can convince itself it’s having a good time.

Some sort of sea-green cocktail was circulating but I didn’t like the look of it so I asked for a Coke. No luck. I settled for a glass of Rose’s lime juice which Perry produced for me from his kitchen. The trouble with alcohol is that it tastes so disgusting, and if you start mixing lime juice with, for example, gin, the result always seems to me to be an affront to the taste-buds. Someone offered me a cigarette but I waved it away. I’ve never been able to see the point of smoking. It smells vile and all that ash makes such a mess. If you’ve got to do something with your mouth and hands between meals, why not sip Coke and chew gum? American civilisation could be pretty weird – all those obese cars – but some of the basic innovations, such as Coke and gum, were genuinely useful ... Or so it seemed to me at the age of twenty.

Marina pounced on me within seconds. (‘Nicky darling, heavenly to see you!’) She was wearing a silvery cylinder squashed in the right places to show off her Venus de Milo figure. Her friends Emma-Louise and Holly also pounced. (Nicky –
super!
’
one shrieked, and: ‘We’ve won our bet that you’d be wearing jeans – even to an orgy at Albany!’ screamed the other.) But there was no sign of my friend Venetia. I was told she was too busy preparing for her wedding. I was just sighing with regret when Dinkie undulated by, entwined with Michael, and gave me a wink as she passed. This enthralled me. I spent some time wondering whether I should have winked back, but I wouldn’t have wanted to offend Michael. Finally Perry ended my reverie by musing to me: ‘Christian and Katie are late – stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, I suppose,’ and I heard myself utter the
non sequitur:
‘You never mentioned that you knew my brother Martin.’

‘Something told me,’ said Perry, ‘that you got very, very tired of people droning on about your brother,’ and suddenly I decided to like him.

I said: ‘Do you go to the theatre a lot?’

‘All the time, yes, I’m an addict. Look, come and meet some of my thespian friends ...’- I met his thespian friends of both sexes. Perry never mentioned my connection with Martin, but Katie’s brother Simon, a pea-brained product of Eton, eventually let the cat out of the bag and then all the thespians started to gush over me with the result that the party became tedious. I took refuge in the lavatory. Venturing out at last with reluctance I found myself overpowered by the desire for more lime juice but before retiring to the kitchen to find the bottle I moseyed around, putting my nose in the dining-room where a buffet was laid out, casting an eye on Perry’s bedroom where a single bed added weight to the theory that he was undersexed, and taking a peek at the adjoining bathroom where I found a peculiar Picasso-style drawing of a mermaid.

Having noted the complete absence of any item which would have indicated homosexual leanings, I beetled down some stairs into the basement kitchen and came to a halt, mouth gaping and eyes wide, at the splendid sight which confronted me. The kitchen was a historical masterpiece, untouched by the mid-twentieth-century mania for making kitchens look like poor relations of the morgue. I saw a large wooden table, very handsome, a gas stove which could only have been pre-war, and a distinguished porcelain sink. The old range had been left in place for its ornamental value, and beside it there was even a set of brass fire-irons: poker, tongs, shovel and soot-brush. Amazing! Anyone who lived in 1963 and kept fire-irons in his kitchen had to be exceptional, and I saw clearly then that Perry was no mn-of-the-mill theatrical hanger-on with homosexual leanings but a highly original celibate who spoke Russian, lived in a palace, devoted his free time to civilised cultural pursuits – and kept Rose’s lime juice in some corner I now had to find.

I opened the door of a gas
-gas! –
refrigerator that had to be at least thirty years old but no bottle of lime juice stood keeping cool on the shelves. Instead I found caviar from Fortnum’s, a bottle of champagne, half a Melton Mowbray pie and a jar of olives. By this time I was beginning to think that all the kitchen lacked was one of the old-style butlers, complete with white hair, a stoop and corns.

I prowled on, pausing at an antique cupboard which housed some very grand china, and reached a door set in the wall near the back entrance – the tradesmen’s entrance, as it would have been in the old days. Opening the door I discovered a coal-cellar – a
coal-cellar!
Within spitting distance of Piccadilly! – and inside this astonishing relic of a vanished past was a
large
load of coal.
Surreal. What kind of man kept a cellar full of coal in a designated smokeless zone? A man of infinite wit and style.

I decided Perry was probably the one man in England who was worthy of being Christian’s best friend.

But still no Rose’s lime juice. Abandoning the coal-cellar I opened yet another mysterious door and found a larder complete with a cooked pheasant sitting on a plate and a tub of Stilton exuding its famous pong. Nearby I spotted pâté de foie gras, Gentleman’s Relish and — yes, Rose’s lime juice. Grabbing the bottle I helped myself to a spare sliver of Stilton before moving to the table to replenish my glass.

Perry clattered down the stairs just as I was diluting the juice with water. He had an empty jug in his hands and Christian at his heels. ‘... playing with fire,’ he was saying as I tuned in to the conversation in mid-sentence. ‘Marina may be all talk and no action, but —’ He saw me and broke off.

‘Nick!’ exclaimed Christian in delight.

‘Hi!’ I said pleased.

‘Sorry, Nick — I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Perry, setting down the jug on the table and extracting some ice from the bag in the refrigerator. ‘Glad you found the lime juice. Would you like to see my coal-cellar?’

‘It’s a land-mark,’ said Christian, preparing to exhibit it to me. The last full coal-cellar left in London. He shows it to everyone.’

‘Groovy,’ I said, feigning ignorance of the phenomenon and taking a peek. ‘But why all the coal?’

‘I made a mistake with the coal-merchant just before the smokeless zone was declared. Pass that bottle of gin, would you, Christian?’

The doorbell rang in the distance.

‘You answer that,’ said Christian to him. ‘I’ll mix the jungle juice.’

‘It’s probably my neighbours complaining about the noise ...’ He clattered back upstairs.

‘How are things going?’ said Christian agreeably to me as he poured a huge slug of gin into the jug.

‘Okay.’ Awkwardly I edged closer to him. ‘Sorry about my father,’ I said. ‘I really busted a gut trying to get him to see you. I hope you didn’t feel I’d let you down.’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ He gave me his warmest smile. ‘He wrote a most helpful letter, so you needn’t think you pleaded my cause in vain ... All set for your final year at Cambridge?’

‘Yep.’ I watched with amazement as he added liquid from three other bottles to the gin in the jug and then topped off the poison with Schweppes bitter lemon.

‘I suppose you haven’t been seduced since I last saw you by the current fashion among undergraduates for travelling around America once their finals are finished? I’m told that travel on a Greyhound bus is guaranteed to broaden the mind.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Sounds a bit tame, if you ask me, but then I speak as someone who did two years’ National Service in the army. Now,
there
was an experience that broadened the mind! I enjoyed that escape into a different world.’

I had never before thought of National Service in a positive light. I had just assumed it would be boring and I had heaved a sigh of relief when it had been abolished, but the word ‘escape’ in Christian’s last sentence was now reverberating compellingly in my mind. I heard myself say: ‘I wouldn’t mind getting away for a while. But my father would worry about me if I went off into the blue on my own, and
I
’
d
worry if I knew he was worrying.’

‘Obviously in that case the travel would need to be structured in some way which would win his approval and enable him to relax. How about doing voluntary work overseas for a Christian organisation? You’d be in the company of responsible people, and he’d recognise the work as useful experience for someone who planned to be a clergyman.’

This struck me as such a brilliant suggestion that for a moment I was speechless with excitement. A vision of change blazed through my psyche. No more living with the Community and enduring their prim piety. No more feeling tethered to Starrington Manor. I could take two years off, just as if I were doing National Service, and work for a Christian organisation in ... The word ‘Africa’ floated across my mind. Exotic, exciting Africa which I had longed to visit ever since I had seen Stewart Granger in
King Solomon
’
s Mines. Distant
Africa, where no one would have heard of Jonathan Darrow, the famous spiritual director, and Martin Darrow, the famous actor. Africa, Africa, Africa ... I could almost hear the drums beating to lure me on my way.

‘That’s cool,’ I said to Christian. ‘A great suggestion. Thanks.’

He finished stirring the new batch of sea-green poison and smiled at me. Then he said idly: ‘Beware of getting too tied up with that father of yours. Are you sure you really want to be a clergyman?’

Instantly the Dark began to creep into the room. It appeared stealthily, eerily, billowing around Christian so that he became a shadowed figure, sinister and subversive, a skeleton cloaked in black, a nightmare from some medieval vision in which The Dark’ appeared not as a poisonous cloud but as a horned creature bent on destruction. I saw no horned creature but I felt that poisonous cloud, and as soon as I felt it I knew what it was, I just knew, I experienced ‘gnosis’, the knowledge that was special.

I stood facing Christian across the kitchen table while the party roared above us, and as the moment of ‘gnosis’ hit me I knew there was something very wrong with him, I knew that his psyche was far out of alignment, utterly dislocated, and that the Dark was streaming into him through every fissure of his personality. Yet never had Christian seemed kinder to the man so many years his junior, and never had his words seemed more charming and benign.

The Dark was now a huge pressure on my psyche and I knew I had to blast myself free. ‘Yes, I do want to be a priest,’ I said. ‘I want to serve
Jesus Christ –
’
Instantly the pressure eased as I opened up the scene to the Light – and nothing on this earth is going to stop me.’

‘Well done!’ said Christian at once without ä trace of condescension. Moving away from me with the jug of poison in his hands, he began to mount the stairs. ‘In that case I can only wish you the best of luck and every success in the Church.’

In silence I followed him upstairs, the glass of lime juice still clutched in my sweating palm.

V

‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right,’ said my father when I returned home and confided in him. Any manifestation of the Dark was always so horrifying, reeking as it did of death and disintegration, that my strongest instinct was still to seek sanctuary in his cottage, and as usual in such circumstances my father moved to reassure me by speaking very calmly. ‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right ...’ He often said that, but now I found the words not soothing but irritating. I didn’t want my judgement queried. I
knew
what had happened. Having recognised that the Devil was infiltrating Christian I wanted to know how to deal with this knowledge. How could I get Christian to an exorcist? How could I dare to face him in future? How could I be sure that the Devil wouldn’t send a demon to infest me as the result of the scene in the kitchen when I’d defied him by declaiming the name – and thus invoking the power – of Christ? (I should perhaps apologise at this point for using old-fashioned picture-language, but some realities are almost impossible to express verbally without the liberal use of symbols.) All these questions seemed to me to be very urgent, yet as far as I could see my father was far from brimming over with the desire to answer them.