The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (29 page)

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, this baby she is going to have, of course. It was all she could talk about.’

‘Ah. Well, I can see how that might seem –’

‘She’s always been like this, you know, Harriet. I’d forgotten what she was like. I’d forgotten how much I hated her.’

‘When is the baby due?’ I asked, rather shocked by his language.

‘Oh, in a few months. I wasn’t going to flatter her sense of self-importance by asking her questions like that. Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’

We left the tiled gloom of the restaurant behind us and spent the rest of our lunch hour in the pleasant green space of Finsbury Circus, a short walk away. It was now early in March, and just about warm enough to sit outside reading a book in the weak sunshine. I had with me a copy of
The Hawk in the Rain
, the first collection of Ted Hughes, then a little-known poet. Roger was reading his well-thumbed edition of
Witchcraft Today
, by Gerald Gardner. This sensational volume had been published about five years earlier, and had attracted considerable attention, especially in the popular Sunday newspapers which liked to titillate their readers with the notion that modern witches’ covens existed the length and breadth of suburban England, where sex orgies and acts of naked devil-worship regularly took place behind respectable closed doors. Roger dismissed these reports as lurid fantasies and insisted, on the contrary, that Mr Gardner’s book was one of the most important publications of recent times: he maintained that it had uncovered a vital, authentic spiritual heritage which stretched far back into the pre-Roman era, and provided a valuable counter-tradition to the repressive authoritarianism of the Christian Church. Mr Gardner’s name for this alternative religion was ‘Wicca’, and its main characteristic was that it involved the worship of two Gods, or rather a God and a Goddess, represented respectively by the Sun and the Moon. Not being much inclined towards religious belief of any sort, I tended not to listen too closely when Roger was expounding on this theme, although I do remember what he said to me that afternoon in Finsbury Circus. ‘You should pay attention to this, Harold, if you’re serious about wanting to write. The Goddess is where all poetic inspiration comes from. Read Robert Graves if you don’t believe me. You’d better keep on the right side of her. Unfortunately …’ (he put the book down and lay back on the grass, his head resting on folded hands) ‘she absolutely disapproves of homosexuality, and has terrible punishments in store for those who practise it. Bad news for the likes of us.’

I said nothing, but a shiver of protest went through me when I heard this remark, which was thrown out casually, as if merely the statement of an obvious truth. I knew that Roger sometimes took pleasure in being foolishly provocative. It was also that afternoon, I remember, that he first mentioned his intention to place a malediction on his sister.

Meanwhile, Roger did not neglect the more material side of our affairs. Over the next few weeks, he came to a series of further financial arrangements with Crispin Lambert and his numerous bookmakers, each one more ambitious and more elaborate than the last. I heard talk of each-way bets, four-folds and accumulators. Then we were on to any-to-come bets, fivespots, pontoons and sequential multiples. Each one of these bets was recorded on a betting slip: Crispin would calculate what this slip might be worth if the race had the desired outcome, and would then sell us an option to buy the slip off him when the result was announced. Somehow – I presumed because Roger and Crispin were accurate in their calculations, and in their study of the horses’ form – we seemed to make a profit every time, and everybody came out of it a winner. Soon we became bolder, and the agreements we signed no longer gave us the
option
of purchasing Crispin’s betting slips when the race was over, but imposed on us the
obligation
to do so. We chose to do this because the terms he offered us were more favourable, even though the risk involved (on our side) was much greater. Steadily, however, our travelling fund grew larger and larger. Roger became increasingly excited about the prospect of giving up our jobs and embarking on this voyage, until he could barely talk about anything else: it became his absolute obsession. The cultural pleasures on offer in London seemed to have palled, as far as he was concerned, and we rarely went to concerts or the theatre together any more. Instead, if we were not poring over maps of Pompeii and drawings of ancient German burial mounds, he preferred to stay indoors and study his growing library of volumes on witchcraft and paganism. And somehow, subtly, indefinably, although our trip was still talked about very much as a shared endeavour, I felt the closeness between us beginning to slip away, was more and more conscious that I had somehow disappointed him, failed to meet his expectations, and this realization upset me deeply.

Then, one day in the middle of the week, he came to me with a proposal which caused me some alarm.

‘I was with Crispin most of last night,’ he said, ‘in The Rising Sun. He really is a very decent fellow, I think. He really wants to help us raise the money for this trip. Anyway, last night, we worked out a way we could do it – all in one fell swoop. By Saturday evening, the money could be ours. We could hand in our notice next week and be on the train to Dover within a fortnight. What do you say?’

Naturally, I said that it all sounded wonderful. But I was less enthusiastic when he told me what he had in mind.

The proposal, in fact, was for one single, gigantic bet – or rather, a phenomenally complex spread of bets – to be placed with five bookmakers on Saturday’s races. I cannot remember the details now (not surprisingly, since I could never really understand them then), but among the different terms being floated were ‘single stakes about’, ‘round robin’, ‘vice versa’, ‘the flag’, and ‘full-cover multiples’. As before, it was Crispin who had chosen the horses, calculated the odds, placed the bets, and had bundled the whole package up into one financial instrument – the usual signed piece of paper, taken from his pocket book – which he was now offering to sell to us for …

‘… for
how much
?’ I said to Roger, incredulous.

‘I know it sounds a lot – but the winnings will be
five times
that, Harold. Five times!’

‘But that’s the whole of our fund. Everything we’ve saved up so far. All the sacrifices we’ve made to put that money together … Supposing we lose it all?’

‘We can’t lose it all. That’s the beauty of it. If we were just to place that money in a single bet, like most punters would do, then of course we’d be taking a huge risk. But the system Crispin and I have worked out is much cleverer than that. It’s flawless – look.’ He handed me a sheet of foolscap paper, on which were written a series of calculations and mathematical formulae far too complicated for me (or any other averagely intelligent being) to comprehend.

‘But if this system worked,’ I objected, ‘everyone would be doing it.’

‘If they had the brains to work it out, yes.’

‘What are you saying? That you’ve found a way of making money out of nothing? Out of air?’

Roger smiled a proud, secretive smile as he took the paper back. ‘I’ve told you this before,’ he said. ‘You, Harold, are earthbound. You need to develop a more spiritual outlook. Don’t become one of those lesser mortals who inhabits the material world. The world where people spend their lives making things and then buying and selling and using and consuming them. The world of objects. That’s for the hoi polloi, not the likes of you and me. We’re above all that. We’re alchemists.’

It was when Roger began to talk like this, I’m ashamed to say, that I found him most irresistible – even when I knew that I was being controlled and manipulated. It was with a sinking heart, all the same, that I agreed to hand over all of our savings (and rather more) to Crispin in return for his promise that he would sell us, in a few days’ time, the betting slips which both he and Roger assured me would be worth a fortune by then. A sinking heart, and a hollow, nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘Will you telephone me on Saturday?’ I asked. ‘To let me know the outcome – not that it’s in any doubt, of course.’

‘Telephone you? Why on earth would I do that? You’ll be with me, surely.’

‘I was planning to visit my parents,’ I explained. ‘It is the Easter weekend, after all.’

‘Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,’ he said, with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘Haven’t you learned anything from me in the last few months? Must you always run for cover to the safety of those silly bourgeois, Christian values that your family drummed into you from an early age? These Christian festivals are just a sham – a pale shadow of the real thing. You’re coming with me this weekend to discover what Easter is
really
about.’

‘Coming with you? Where?’

‘To Stonehenge, of course. We’ll drive down late on Saturday night. We have to be there before dawn – that’s when the ceremony will begin.’

He went on to explain, carefully, as if to an imbecile child, that the Christian story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ was in fact nothing more than a corruption of much older and more powerful myths concerning the rising of the sun following the vernal equinox. Even the word Easter and its German equivalent,
Ostern
, came from a common origin –
Eostur
or
Ostar
– which to the Norsemen meant the season of the rising sun, the season of new life. And so, at dawn on Sunday, hundreds of pagan worshippers would gather within the great circle of stones outside Salisbury to pay their homage to the Sun God.

‘And you and I, my dear Harold, will most certainly be among them. Come to my place on Saturday evening – we’ll have a little supper – and then some friends will pick us up in their car at about two. We should be there in plenty of time.’

‘Friends?’ I asked. ‘What friends?’

‘Oh, just some people I know,’ he said, enigmatically. Roger liked to keep the different areas of his life strictly compartmentalized, and if he was about to introduce me to some of his fellow pagans, I knew that I was expected to regard this as a special privilege.

‘Remember,’ he said, just before we parted, ‘the Sun God is the masculine God. That’s what we will be going there to worship – the spirit of Manhood, the essence of Maleness. I shall,’ he added (with a challenging gleam in his eye), ‘take it very amiss if you choose not to come.’

I told him that I would think about it, and left in a state of genuine indecision.

Writing all of this down, at almost thirty years’ distance, it seems incredible to me now that I should have been so in thrall to Roger Anstruther and his arrogant, domineering personality. But remember – whoever you are, reading these pages – that I was callow, I was unsure of myself, I was a young man alone in a big, frightening city, and in Roger I felt that I had met someone who – how shall I put this? – who confirmed something about myself. Something I had always suspected – always known, even, in the very remotest depths of my being – but which I had been too frightened (too cowardly, he would say) to acknowledge. I was still, at that tender age, hungry to unravel the mysteries of life. At first I had thought that the answers lay in poetry, but now Roger was beginning to open up a different, even more alluring world to me – a world of shadows, portents, symbols, riddles and coincidences. Was it coincidence, for example, that all our schemes seemed to be coming to fruition on the eve of the festival of the Rising Sun, when this was the very name of the pub where we’d had all our earliest and most significant conversations? Questions like this nagged at my youthful, impressionable mind and made me feel that perhaps I was now on the verge of some revelation, some momentous breakthrough which would resolve all difficulties and set me free from the bonds which I felt had been restraining me all my life.

It was for these reasons – reasons which might seem feeble and even frivolous to an unsympathetic reader (forgive me, Max, if that is you!) – that I chose not to return to my parents’ home that weekend; but on Saturday evening, instead, I set out on the long walk which led from my shared house in Highgate to Roger’s rented bedsitting room in a decrepit Notting Hill terrace.

When I arrived, he was sitting at his desk. I could see at once that something was wrong. His face was deathly pale, and his hands were trembling as he sat hunched over pages and pages of densely scribbled figures, to which he was adding further calculations in pencil, in a state of such ferocious concentration that he barely looked up to register my arrival.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ he answered curtly, and began whispering some more numbers under his breath, while scrawling ever more frantically on the paper.

‘Roger, you look dreadful,’ I persisted. ‘Is it … ?’ Of course, I knew what it was. I felt suddenly faint, and sat down heavily on his bed in the corner of the room. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the wager. Did it go wrong?’

‘Completely wrong,’ he said, in a trembling voice, crumpling up one of the sheets of paper, tossing it aside, and starting on a new one. ‘Utterly wrong.’

‘Well … What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Mean? What does it
mean
?’ He glared at me in fury. ‘It means that we’ve lost everything. It means that on Monday morning I have to give Crispin the lot.’