The Whispering Swarm (23 page)

After a very depressing time of it, Helena at least came away from Harley Street with a new coil, an effective birth control method which did not depend on my clumsiness or our erratic memories. I was depressed and puzzled because for some reason, I suddenly developed a strong desire to visit the Alsacia. After delivering a feature to Ted Holmes at
Look and Learn,
I found myself wandering around Carmelite Inn Chambers, looking for the gates. But I had no luck. I was relieved, later, when I sat on top of the 15 bus going home. I felt obscurely guilty and said nothing to Helena, though she sensed my secret. The business of running a new magazine soon drove thoughts of the Alsacia away.

We had fallen in love with our Ladbroke Grove flat. The noise from the traffic at the front was impersonal and at the back, with the big gardens, it was often tranquil. Helena was much happier and, because of the gardens, the children didn't require our complete attention. But I needed to earn more and help keep an ambitious magazine going until we started getting income. I became busier than I liked. My anxiety had begun to manifest itself in bouts of bad temper. I never attacked anyone physically of course, but I could become, briefly, a roaring monster with my friends or Helena. I wouldn't have blamed Helena if she'd left me. Of course I experienced the usual guilt but I wasn't happy with myself and wanted to change without quite knowing how. Helena would occasionally take the kids out to give me the space I was demanding but it didn't help much. I still felt abandoned. I saw a shrink up at St Charles Hospital but all he did was prescribe Valium, tell me to drink Guinness and warned me that if I smoked marijuana I should be careful because dealers cut it with cocaine. I left his surgery wondering if everyone in his profession was as ill informed. To work I had to pull myself together but I was growing increasingly melancholy. Helena had plenty of ideas about what was wrong with me, but her theories seemed no better than mine.

Helena and the kids had gone out one warm, early summer afternoon. I think it must have been early closing day, obeying that benign law which insisted on a shop assistant's half holiday midweek, before Thatcher smashed protectionism and gave us freedom to choose between a rock and a hard place. The sound of traffic dropped almost to nothing on those lazy afternoons. The whole city grew drowsy. I had taken a break from the typewriter to stretch my legs, going downstairs through the kids' room, inching my way between the pianola and a toy castle, round the vast rocking horse we had bought from Hamleys during a flush period, and walking out into our little patch of ratty green garden with its orange brick walls, its briar roses sturdily climbing their makeshift trellises. On the warm, dusty air came distant sounds of adults and children playing in the gardens on the other side of the wall. The air, carrying the scent of roses and car exhaust, was a perfect mixture of town and country. I felt pleasantly alone. Relaxed, I lit a spliff.

I was enjoying the moment when a large black bird hopped on top of the red brick wall, put its beautiful black head on one side, fixed me with a sardonic jet-black eye and croaked, ‘Hello.'

Though this was not the first talking bird I had encountered, I was still surprised. ‘I've never met a talking crow before,' I said.

‘No and you're not likely to,' said the bird with astonishing elocution. ‘I'm a raven. I was sent from the Alsacia because no other messages got through to you. Apparently everyone's been calling you. They even sent the green Lagonda but the people said you had moved or that you were not who you distinctly are. You might have several enemies hereabouts. This is nice, isn't it? Like being in the country.'

Once again I suspected LSD, increasingly popular in the area. And I had just lit a joint. I frowned.

‘Now the neighbours will hear me talking to myself and will be sure I'm barmy,' I said.

‘They'll think
they're
barmy when they hear me talking to you,' said the raven. ‘Shall I caw?'

‘If you like.'

‘Sure.' He lifted his head, opened his beak, drew breath and let out an incredibly loud cry which echoed around the square. His next words were a whisper in comparison. ‘OK. So shall I hang around like an omen, perched on your backside as you pray for release? Or will you waddle back indoors and see who can get to that open upstairs window first? I'm here to say Moll Midnight asked after you and sent her best. She says to drop in any time. More importantly, Friar Isidore would like to see you urgently at a place of your own choosing.'

Surely this was too much of a delay to be another late acid reaction. If anything, this was a good old-fashioned psychotic episode. I'd read about those, too. Could I be experiencing serious psychosis? I didn't believe it. There had been no warning sign. Pulling myself together I remembered when this had happened before. I had met a talking jackdaw when I was a kid climbing on piles of weed-grown rubble. He had hopped on my shoulder and we'd exchanged a few words before he no doubt flew off home. It had nonetheless been a magical experience. ‘Why would Friar Isidore send a talking bird? A raven at that. Aren't you a harbinger of something?'

‘Doom? I think that's because the word “doom” is tellingly croaked. You've seen me around. I've been keeping an eye on you. But I'm not a spy. I'm not a soddin' harbinger, either. I'm just a regular messenger. I work part-time at the Tower. Well, not your Tower. The old Elizabethan Tower. I had an idea for a story, incidentally.…' And the raven began to do the thing an author most fears: he outlined the plot of his novel to me. I had to stand there, smoking a Sullivan and listening to what seemed a pretty banal story about a bunch of birds who enjoyed tricking people into thinking they were schizophrenic. ‘Believe me, I had this idea long before Hitchcock!'

‘Short on irony,' I said when he had finished. ‘Try it in the States.'

‘Oh what a witty man the boy's become. I remember you blushing away in the stables. Seems like yesterday. You didn't even notice me. Anyway, they'd like to see you for old time's sake at the Carmelite Inn entrance. That's all I was told. And I'll be looking out for your next book. If it's anything like mine, I'll sue.' With this empty threat he hopped ostentatiously to the flower bed and waddled across the lawn to admire himself in the reflecting window glass.

‘You're probably an illusion,' I said, ‘so why should I listen to you?'

He paused in his grooming. ‘Why shouldn't you? You're short of tin, aren't you?'

‘I'll be fine when I finish the story I'm working on upstairs. I'm not exactly looking for fairy gold. Any particular hour of the day?'

‘If you've just started the story, make it this time next week. If you're still usually writing them in three days, that will let you recover.'

‘It's the only economic way to justify doing this one,' I said, ‘since Fleetway gets the royalties. But with a few names changed and giving horses a few extra legs I'll probably sell them as sword and sorcery novels in the States.'

‘So you're still doing those awful historical fantasy things?'

I was sensitive about my hackwork. I turned my back on the raven. I went inside and upstairs to my typewriter where I was, of course, working on the first of another series of Meg stories:
Black Sword of the Dales
. The window was open. He must have peeked.

I looked for bird shit on the carpet.

 

16

SUCCUMBING

It came on me the way an affair can happen, suddenly, when everything at home is fine, knocking along okay, and then, there you are in some sleazy Bloomsbury bedsitter, doing what comes naturally and with such unwelcome complications.…

A day later the book was done and I went to Fleet Street to give it to Bill Baker. Helena, remembering what happened the last time I delivered a script in person, told me not to wake the children when I stumbled home. I thought it wise to skip lunch with Bill. His lunches were likely to last into the small hours of the next day and never leave licenced premises. So I tried to hand in the manuscript at the ground-floor reception desk. But the uniformed old jobsworth on duty insisted I deliver it myself. On entering the lift I recognised Les Brown, a former colleague from my editorial days, who suggested we go to get a few pints for old time's sake. I made an excuse, reached my floor, threw the envelope on Bill Baker's desk then legged it to the annex and the back lift generally used by directors.

In Farringdon Road I found myself without thinking heading for the Old Bailey and was soon in the familiar grey backstreets which took me to the great Courts themselves and Metropolitan, our
Tarzan
typesetters. I walked down the steep steps into the clacking office and the crowded proofing room, full of the same men in waistcoats and felt hats who had always seemed to be there, and asked someone I half recognised if he'd seen Friar Isidore. ‘Does he still come in?'

‘Yeah,' said the sallow old hack not looking up from his galleys. ‘Usually on a Wednesday.'

‘Know much about him?'

An expression of disgust. ‘Well, he's a bloody monk, ain't he? Not that much to know about a monk, is there? Why?' He became alert. ‘Done anything he shouldn't?'

I grew automatically wary. ‘You've not heard anything? About LSD?'

‘Why, is he a millionaire?' That was gullible old Fleet Street for you. Nobody more behind the times. Nobody wanting to believe a sensational lie more than the journalist it's being told to. Sniffing the same old trails. Some of them honestly believed they printed the truth.

‘I mean drugs,' I said. Did he make a habit of slipping Mickey Finns, say, into young editors' cups of Darjeeling? In the semidarkness the few men standing about waiting to receive their ‘pulls' pricked up their evil little ears.

I looked around, rather regretting what I'd said, and then it dawned on me why I'd rushed to get the manuscript in today: so I could be paid by the Thursday after next. It was paysheet day at Fleetway. Leave it any later and you didn't get paid for two weeks. We used to think that was slow. Wednesday? Proofing day for
Tarzan
and …

I turned.

‘I had just left! Some instinct brought me back.' Friar Isidore stood in the doorway. He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps I forgot these galleys!' In white cassock, taller than anyone except me, his eyes mild and twinkling and his long fingers tightly twined before him, the friar regarded me from above rimless glasses. He seemed genuinely happy. He was radiant. ‘Oh! How delightful! Wait a few minutes and I'll be there. I wasn't expecting you until next week.' He ran up to the desk to receive his forgotten envelope. He waved it. ‘Doubly blessed, eh?'

So I stepped outside with him and we went down to Ludgate Hill to that same clattering, chattering, giggling ABC Teashop where I was careful to watch that he put nothing in my cup. It was not so much for himself, he said, as for Father Abbot who asked almost every day about me. Had he made me nervous, showing me too much, too soon? He had tried to give me what was needed to persuade the prince to throw in with us. ‘At present he is adrift, dragged along one brane and then another by time's awful gravity.…'

‘So he sent a talking raven rather than a billet-doux,' I said.

Brother Isidore seemed to be humouring me rather than I him. Perhaps the LSD had permanently affected both of us? I let it drop. I don't think he had any idea what I was talking about. I smiled to myself. Suddenly this wasn't a very sinister rabbit hole at all.

‘What's wrong with the abbot?' I surprised myself. I felt genuine concern.

‘He had set great store by you. Will you come to see him?'

I was wary. ‘Not for tea. Or coffee. Or lemonade.'

He frowned, puzzled. ‘No refreshment of any kind shall be offered if that suits you,' he said.

I loved his gentle innocence. If it was assumed then I was completely fooled. And if he had anything but the best of intentions, at least in his scheme of things, he did not betray by the slightest expression or tic that he was lying.

‘And how is Father Grammaticus?' Was the abbot manipulating this sweet-natured man?

‘Well. As ever, well! He has a great spirit and enjoys robust health.'

I thought I had last seen a rather frail, delicate old man. Apparently he had been ill when I saw him first.

Friar Isidore led me back through that rich, strong-smelling rat's nest of lanes, alleys, courts and twittens, more intricate than a North African souk, to Carmelite Inn Chambers, until we again pushed open the thick iron-bound doors of the Alsacia. No illusion there! So parts of my delusion
were
true! Before we ever reached Alsacia's massive doors I had walked under old stoneworks which might once have been gatehouses, like parts of abandoned baileys around which buildings of all uses and eras had grown.

And there was The Swan With Two Necks, quiet at this time of day, an enormous, rambling, ramshackle building linked to other ramshackle buildings, leaning hard against each other to form the inner yard. And in front of that another cobbled square. I looked for the tavern's inhabitants. I thought for a second I saw the potman, Joey Cornwall, rolling a big barrel through the doors. A few others stood at rest, chatting, leaning on brooms, setting down pails. An ordinary lazy Wednesday afternoon in a quiet, domestic bit of London. Their costumes were rather drab, their long hair dirty. They did not look especially old-fashioned. I saw no beautiful girl in highwayman costume. No sign of anything at all romantic. Only the sweet scent of horse manure told me the stables were still in use. I laughed to myself, shaking my head as we rounded a corner and passed under an archway opening out into a forecourt planted with shrubs. We entered the old abbey, now smelling of rich summer flowers, mould and dust, dust which curled and fluttered in the afternoon light; and there in those mellow cloisters I again came face-to-face with the patrician Father Grammaticus.