Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  Albert clenched his hands in his pockets. ‘I was busy.’

  ‘We’re all busy. You know that. It’s really a pity you weren’t there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, as I’m sure you know by now, we won. The War Crimes Bill went through, with a big majority.’

  ‘It’s been through before. The Lords will stall it.’

  ‘Maybe. But the worst is behind us now. The Government will use the parliament act, if necessary. If the Lords make trouble, so can we.’

  ‘You’ll force it through?’

  Erica nodded. The light danced on her hair. Albert’s cod cooled. His hands in his pockets were sweating. Erica smiled. She reached over and took a long sip from his glass of Soave. ‘Cheers!’

  The trouble with love, thought Albert bitterly, was that it always had a way of hitting back at you. When he and Erica had been lovers, it had all seemed fine, in her little flat in Majuba Crescent, on the first floor of a Victorian house in Islington. A black and white kitchen. Views of the old bakery which had become an Indian vegetarian restaurant called Tickety Boo. And ‘Tickety boo!’ was what Albert said, frequently, as he took a cab from the Commons and picked up the key under the concrete Egyptian cat with the agate eyes which guarded the front door, and mixed himself a Campari and orange, at around three of an afternoon. Even better when Erica arrived and kicked off her shoes. Best of all when they took to the big mahogany bed with the pink duvet, Albert always insisting on keeping his socks on until the last moment.

  It might have gone on like that for ever. Well, for some time, anyway. The ride to Islington, the key under the cat, the big bed and the pink duvet and him keeping his socks on until the last moment. Tickety boo! And nobody, but nobody, suspecting it for a moment.

  ‘Sentimentalist!’ Erica liked to say, unhooking her bra, stepping out of her pants and lying down beside him as the Islington afternoon sun painted her body beige and silver. All London seemed to be waiting under a low, leaning sky, as if something were about to happen. As it always did, at around about that time of day in Majuba Crescent.

  Why sentimentalist? ‘Because you cling to the last to something small. Personal. A talisman. You hope it might protect you on your journey into the unknown. It’s quite touching. Even boyish. But it looks pretty damn silly, all the same. A very large man wearing nothing but a pair of tiny blue socks! Get them off, Albie, get them all off!’

  She would invariably mount him. Erica was a top sort of person. She had the very muscular thighs and the straight back of the born equestrian, though, as she drily acknowledged, there had never been much call for horses or riders in the little village in the shadow of the steel mill where she grew up. In another, former life, said Erica, she must have been a man. Certainly, in her next life, she would be a man.

  That their lovemaking took on the rhythms of parliamentary debate was perhaps not surprising after nearly forty years of shared experience in the House. An unexpected coalition. Backbenchers from opposite sides of the House. What a wonderful cover it made! Sir Horace Epstein, whose seat in Deeping Wallop Albert had inherited, had once advised him on sexual mores for budding politicians: ‘Never sleep with your secretary. She really wants to marry you and is too po-faced to tell you. But she’ll tell your wife, if she has to.’ And he also said: ‘On no account sleep with a constituent. Secretly each and every voter suspects that Members of Parliament couldn’t give a fuck! Never give them cause to form the opposite impression. They will not forgive you.’

  Albert had followed Sir Horace’s advice. He wondered if he would have approved of the relationship he had with Erica? What would he have thought of a liaison with someone from the party opposite, from the ranks of the enemy? To Albert’s way of thinking it had considerable merits. Not only were Erica and he from opposing sides of the House, they came from different ends of the country, from ideologies so formally at odds with one another that they were left with absolutely nothing in common, citizens indeed of two nations, and the very idea of the pair of them spending afternoons in bed was preposterous. Albert with his gleaming, aerodynamic, black Italian shoes and his damp, cunningly indecisive Conservatism. His head of fine full hair he liked to smooth back at moments of rhetorical excitement. And she with her Hermès scarves, her irritable, clever, pragmatic socialism. Her black silk underwear bought on her numerous trips abroad, always at the airport, economical naughty French lace but English proportions. His ridiculous small socks, his damp hair and large pink cheeks. No, their affair was so improbable as to be not even above suspicion. That was precisely it. The Islington afternoons of Albert and Erica were below suspicion.

  Did she rise above him in a series of leaping movements, higher and higher, so that it seemed she must unseat herself? Well, what was that, seen through half-closed eyes, but something very like the curious bobbing motion that goes on when members leap to their feet in the attempt, usually vain, to catch the eye of the Speaker. And why did she lift herself to these heights, why did she jump up so often? Well, because she was allowing, by varying degrees, her vagina to ascend higher and higher up Albert’s small but broad, thick indeed, uncomplaining member. And their very coming together, what was that – in its increasingly incoherent, ecstatic murmurings, as she moved faster and faster on him and he rose to meet her descending, streaming mass of pubic hair – but, yes, a way of saying, ‘I beg to move the motion.’? For this was indeed a fleshly version of their many parliamentary encounters with all its own secret phrases: ‘Indicators indicate’, and ‘Figures for car sales shown’; its own goads and spurs and doubts – ‘What do you say of these saving ratios for the fourth quarter?’ And in its vigorous, flourishing climax, after which Erica came slowly to rest, dripping wet, her hair soaked, her face pink, was there not exactly the downward movement of the head he had seen so often in the House as she concluded a vigorous attack, in a drum roll of damning statistics which had the members opposite baying like wolves. ‘Order! Order!’ cried the Speaker. And well might he cry, as Erica and Albert lay beside one another with pounding hearts in the fading early evening light.

  Where was Albert in all of this? Well, the odd thing was that even though he had no clothes on, though he had expended himself with about as much force as his damp, decent Conservatism permitted, he remained to the last a backbencher, on those afternoons in Islington when he was so slow to take off his socks. Flat on his back lay the disconsolate Tory.

  In fact it had lasted for only half a parliamentary session because of a discovery Albert had made on leaving the Islington flat one evening at about six. The moon was just beginning to rise over the vegetarian restaurant which, that evening, was offering as the specials of the day marrow au gratin and artichoke pie followed by mousse of lychee and cloudberry sauce. The moon had a yellow, lugubrious, rather threadbare look that reminded Albert of the old days when ponderous and sad officials from the Iron Curtain countries visited the House for fraternal exchanges of greetings. Their eyes were liquid and melancholy. The moon could have been made in Albania.

  Erica had left the flat early for a committee meeting. Her colour was high, her very fetching green costume with gold epaulettes looking somehow rather martial but very trim all the same. A regular cannon of a woman, Albert had thought. Stacked, solid, muscular, with a kind of brassy gleam that reminded him of a big artillery shell. Their session that afternoon on the pink duvet had seemed a bit off. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but it was the sense that Erica had not been her bucking, rollicking self. True she had still laughed at his socks. She had swung into the saddle with practised ease. But he missed the wild thudding drive, the sense of something given and got. And when he reached up, as he knew she liked him to, and seized her breasts, instead of throwing back her head and galloping even more wildly, she had seized his wrists and held them off, until she came in a series of grunts and interjections and calls to order.

  What was all that about? It occurred to him that Erica’s somewhat inhibited performance possib
ly had to do with the introduction of television into the House. The cumulative effects had been dire. Members were not only better dressed these days, they were better behaved. They seldom slept openly after lunch. They hardly ever put their thumbs in their ears and waggled their fingers at members opposite who mixed up their savings ratios with their figures for car sales. They no longer shrieked at each other, because the cameras did not like it and there was always the chance of the viewer glimpsing flying spittle. Television influenced even the quality of the insults. Nowadays they called each other Kermit or Noddy or JR – more evidence of the power of television. Vilified the party opposite by calling them names you knew the viewing public would recognise when they saw you on television, because they had seen the originals, on television. Really, it was too bad. He had voted against it, of course. But they brought the bloody cameras in anyway. Most of his back-bench friends had voted against. But Johnny Public had got his way. And Johnny Public regarded backbenchers as the lowest form of life.

  On that fateful Islington evening Albert had stooped to place the key beneath the cat. Its unwinking agate eye, its right to Albert’s left, took on, in that cheap Albanian moonlight, a faintly mocking gleam. ‘Bloody cat!’ Albert declared, straightening up and then gave the base of the cat a sharp kick. That’s how it was. He might have missed her if he’d straightened a moment later. If he hadn’t paused to kick the cat he might never have known. If Erica had not had to get back to the House so early. If any one of a thousand things had happened, he would have missed her. As it was they almost collided.

  ‘Innocenta!’

  ‘Hello, Daddy,’ said his daughter, or someone who was certainly the spitting image of her. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Such questions around evening in Islington take on a formidable force, and Albert was obliged, not for the first time in his life, to take refuge in that most useful of evasive tactics, surprised indignation. ‘What on earth are you wearing, girl?’

  Innocenta really didn’t want to say. The sight of her father exasperated and depressed her. She had not seen him since she walked out on Max’s Grand Bargain.

  She said: ‘How’s Grandpa? Hating it, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Your grandfather decided he’d be happier in a more structured environment,’ said Albert.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Innocenta suspiciously. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s moved to one of these residential care centres. For senior people. Elders, is the preferred term. Place called Serenity House?’

  ‘Old age home, you mean?’

  ‘Eventide refuge. North London’s best.’

  Innocenta laughed bitterly. ‘Poor Grandpa. He’s looking a bit like King Lear after all. You’ve shipped him off.’

  ‘His choice,’ said Albert, ‘entirely.’

  ‘You broke the bargain. But you kept the house. That’s pretty good even for someone who is bound into the power structures of the Other World.’

  ‘What “Other World”?’

  ‘Any world that has not joined the Aquarian Conspiracy. The world that’s left behind. Your world. The world that’s lost touch with itself.’

  Albert stared at his daughter. She had on her Doc Martens. Over her white robes she wore a heavy tweed sport coat. It gave her a vaguely Arabic look. Innocenta was wearing white because that’s what the Master had ordered. The Master, in far-away Poona, clearly had no idea how difficult it was to keep to his firm dress code if he kept changing his mind about colours. At first, everything had had to be orange. Then he said it should be maroon for meditating. But white when sitting in Buddha Hall. Around her neck she wore a necklace of wooden beads.

  Innocenta had been around. She’d tried truancy as a schoolgirl. She’d tried grass. She had tried to live in a squat in Camden High Street. She had tried loving her father and hating her mother. She’d had a phantom pregnancy at fifteen and a real one at sixteen. She’d had an abortion on her seventeenth birthday. She’d tried aromatherapy and the flotation tank. She even tried good works and served as a meals on wheels driver for the Haringey Council, for about a week, until they discovered that most of her meals on wheels ended up in a squat in Camden High Street. Prone as she was to emotional enthusiasms, Innocenta had also practised abstinence for higher religious reasons, particularly Karezza, an Indian technique in which orgasm is deliberately suppressed during sexual intercourse in order to raise mystical awareness. She had developed a bad nose after three weeks on coke. She had shown signs of wishing to become a nun and indeed had been accepted by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart as the right material. But she ran away to the Poona Ashram instead. At that time the Bhagwan changed his name to Osho. Disenchanted, Innocenta returned to London and the squat and an offshoot of the Bhagwan’s movement – run by a dissenting ex-accountant, once named Trevor and now known always and only as ‘The Master’. The trouble with Trevor, as Innocenta told herself in her lighter moments, was that he had no idea of the cost of things. The response from various church members to this piece of blasphemy was to accuse Innocenta of being ‘a church of one’.

  She stood on the top step of an Islington house in Majuba Gardens and contemplated her father who appeared to be rather pink in the face and panting slightly, as if he had been taking exercise. She touched her necklace.

  ‘This is my mala. One hundred and eight sandalwood beads. With a picture of the Master.’

  ‘And may one know where you’re going, togged out like that?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, Daddy. I’m here.’ Innocenta pointed down the stairs to the basement flat. ‘This is my church.’

  Albert felt suddenly very uncomfortable. ‘You go to church down there?’

  ‘Have done for weeks now. The International Church of Meditation. ICM. Islington Branch. We believe ICM is to the New Age what IBM is to the Other World.’

  ‘What do you do, down there?’ Albert jerked his chin. Not liking even to acknowledge the church in the basement, the cult beneath his love-nest.

  ‘Energy balancing. Bodywork. Orgasmic undoing. Intuitive massage. Rebirthing and regression.’

  Albert held up a hand. ‘Heard it before. Five hundred quid a month, plus VAT.’

  ‘Six hundred,’ said Innocenta, ‘and if you’re wondering how I can afford it, I’ve been getting large cheques from Jeb Touser. He says they arise out of recalculation of the Grand Bargain. Sounded daft to me. Now I see what he means. Grandpa’s been recalculated into an old age home. You and Mummy are left with the loot. I suppose Grandpa’s clawed back my share. The share that he was going to give to Mummy.’

  Albert thought of the pink duvet above and Innocenta, and the International Church of Meditation, below. What on earth was Orgasmic Undoing? He could imagine what the papers would say if they ever got hold of it.

  Turning his head away from the flight of steps that led down into a small well where a little blond light glimmered above a green painted door (inauspicious entrance to Innocenta’s place of worship) Albert noticed again the Egyptian cat. Its agate eye held a look that seemed both dismissive and superior.

  Still, he could not give way without scoring a point. The parliamentarian was strong in him. ‘There is not an Other world, Innocenta.’

  She looked at him closely. ‘If there wasn’t another world, lots of other worlds, how come you’ve exiled Grandpa to one of them? If there weren’t lots of other worlds what are you doing here? Anyway, what’s Grandpa’s address? I want to go and see him.’

  Naturally it couldn’t go on. Albert knew that. He never returned to the little house in Islington with the pink duvet and the black and white kitchen.

  Now Erica sat next to him wrapped in marine chains, and drank his Soave. She downed the last inch of his wine, and then she told him, while he kept his hands in his pockets and his cod and rice cooled into rocklike ridges and plateaux, like the smooth and serrated lava from some very tiny volcanic eruption.

  ‘All that remains in the way of a full investigation of the Nazis we kn
ow are living in Britain is the passage of the bill through the other place. It’s only a matter of time now before the hunt starts. Of course not everyone suspected will be looked at. We know there are well over seventy cases still alive. That’s according to the report of the War Crimes Inquiry team. But it’s only suggested that perhaps a handful will be looked into. Three. Maybe four. The killings these men are responsible for took place in countries like Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine. Soviet territory. At least in name. But one is different. He was busy in Poland and he was a German. His work in the camps was what they call scientific. Which meant working on people who’d been killed. Or having people killed so as to work on them. Anyway, I felt you should know. For the sake of kindness, Albie. Never let it be said that I was someone to harbour a grudge. Here, take a look at this.’

  ‘This’ was a small piece of paper, about six by four, on which the following information appeared in single spaced type:

  Falkenberg, von, Maximilian, b. Potsdam, 1909. m. Irmgard Kassel 1939 Berlin. d. 1941. Churtseigh, England, 1924-7 Univ. Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, etc. Rhodes Scholar, Nonce College, Oxford, 1936-8; interests: anthropology, ethnic studies, racial science (sic), various establishments Germany and Poland 1940-42. Service on Eastern Front, Minsk, 1943. Contact lost thereafter. But more ‘racial studies’ suspected. Entry into Britain, 1947-8? No trace. One daughter, Elizabeth Augusta. m. Albert Turberville MP.

  ‘This is a libel!’ Albert said.

  Erica Snafus stood up and smiled. ‘No, Albie, I’m doing you a favour.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jack Gets a Job

  They entered Serenity House, let history record, in a bleak November, Jack just forty-eight hours before Max. Mr Fox will testify. Dr Tonks will back him up. That Jack should appear nowhere in the records of the House is easily explained.

  When Cledwyn Fox opened the front door of Serenity House one morning and looked at the boy on the doorstep he was under the impression, sharp, though misconceived as it turned out, that he was some kind of religious freak. Strange how powerfully sure this impression was, certain in that curious way of first impressions, however false they may prove later. Ever afterwards when Cledwyn Fox thought of Jack, something of the aura of a religious salesman, proselytizer, doorstep Bible-puncher, coloured his memory of the boy – the feeling of something spuriously if convincingly holy, the way light through a stained-glass window seems sacred.