Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  The image, which was three or four times life size, dominated the room in which it had been hung. I watched people, as they entered the room and first caught sight of the image, suddenly stop talking and simply stare, all the fashionable private view sociability knocked out of them as if by a physical blow. I myself was stunned and found my eyes swimming with unwelcome tears.

  Suddenly a voice beside me said: ‘I can’t take another minute of this. For Christ’s sake let’s get out of here.’ It was my wife Jenny.

  When we were outside on the steps of the Whitechapel Cube I found that she was shaking. Was it with fear or anger? I could not be sure. I asked her what was the matter.

  ‘Are you thick or something? Can’t you see what they’re doing to that girl?’

  I knew better than to argue with Jenny when she was in this frame of mind so I didn’t, but I still felt rather feeble for not doing so. In retrospect I am glad I didn’t.

  The show almost sold out after the first two private views. The critics were full of praise and even the conservative-minded among them had good things to say. ‘Here at last is a Modern Art of passion and purpose,’ one of them remarked. A few thoughtful questions were raised about Gloria’s role in all this, but these were generally swept aside in the Gadarene rush to acclaim the newly fashionable before it was commonplace to do so.

  Gloria was frequently put forward by Charles and Artie as the third person of an artistic Trinity. ‘Gloria is our Holy Ghost,’ said Artie. She was interviewed on radio and television, but the answers she gave to questions were stilted and artificial. On one occasion she gave only two answers alternately to every question she was asked in a television interview. They were: ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ and ‘You have nothing to fear but fear itself’. She frequently made appearances at premieres and private views dressed in unusual costumes, both masculine and feminine. Nobody seriously doubted that she was little more than a talking puppet in the hands of the men, but feminist protests were kept at bay by Artie who, at every opportunity, praised Gloria’s contribution to this unique artistic collective. Perhaps what really stifled objections was the project’s immense commercial success. Gloria’s image was everywhere. She was even allowed to return, under strict supervision from Artie and Charles, to her initial career as a model. She became, presumably, rich.

  A year went by and then one night at three in the morning Jenny and I were woken by a phone call. The voice at the other end was faint and practically incoherent, but I recognised it eventually as Gloria’s.

  ‘Help me,’ she said. ‘Please help me.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at Stanhill. I’m alone. God, it’s awful. There’s just nothing here. I’m alone. Artie and Charlie have buggered off to some do in London. I don’t know when they’ll be back. I’ve got no car; I can’t drive anyway. I’m trapped. I’m alone. Please. Please help me.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘I don’t speak to them. Daddy died last year. Please! Please! I’m so frightened.’

  ‘All right! I’m coming from London, so I may be some time.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ asked Jenny.

  I explained as best I could. My wife was not sympathetic; in fact she was positively suspicious. As I had never given her any grounds for suspicion I began to be indignant. Then I realised that Gloria might be overhearing all this on the phone so I started to reassure her that I was on my way, but she had rung off. This only increased my self righteous anger. I dressed quickly, left the house and embarked on my drive up to Stanhill.

  A series of mishaps, which included running out of petrol, meant that it was well into the morning before I arrived in Gloucestershire. As I came down the Stanhill Manor drive I saw ahead of me an assemblage of vehicles and flashing lights.

  As I was approaching I made out an ambulance and a police car; I also noticed Charles’s Range Rover. Charles was standing on the drive white and shivering. He wore a dinner jacket.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said. The man was full of rage and, finding no other outlet, he was turning his anger on me. I explained about the phone call and he said abruptly: ‘Well, you’re too fucking late!’

  A pair of ambulance men with a stretcher between them were coming out of the front door. Somehow the red blanket that was meant to have covered the whole of the body on the stretcher had slipped away from the top half of the face. I saw Gloria’s blonde curls, her perfect forehead and her eyes which were wide open in death. There was no mistaking that the last living look in them had been one of absolute terror.

  Charles told me that he had arrived back from London earlier that morning to find her in his bedroom, already dead. There was evidence of her having taken tranquillisers and alcohol, but the eyes were open. He had summoned an ambulance at once but he had known that it was too late.

  ‘Bloody Ada,’ he said. ‘I told the bitch I’d be back. I told her! Well, maybe I was a bit vague. But, I mean, you know! The stupid cow! Why does this have to happen to me?’ Then he burst into tears.

  At the inquest Gloria’s death was found to have had ‘natural causes’, heart failure apparently, perhaps exacerbated by drugs and alcohol. There was a furore, of course, in the papers but that soon died down. The funeral was a dreary, sparsely attended affair at a crematorium. Artie was present, but Charles, for some reason, was not.

  I am told that Charles and Artie paid to have the words SIC TRANSIT carved on her memorial stone, but this may be a myth.

  V

  Soon after the funeral Charles and Artie Katzenberg left for America where, after a successful exhibition, they had fallen out. I never discovered the reason, but I suppose it was to have been expected of two egos like Charles and Artie. After their separation both suffered a decline in fortune. Charles got involved with drugs, but when he had lost all his money he made efforts to be reconciled with Artie. However, on the eve of a meeting between the two, Artie was found stabbed to death in his Manhattan apartment. A rent boy with whom he had been involved was charged and convicted of the murder. Not long after this I read in the papers the surprising news that Charles had married Mahalia Doone in America. There were pictures of a very seedy looking Charles hanging on the arm of Mahalia who was erect and staring straight ahead of her with an inscrutable expression on her face. Charles’s famous lopsided grin was there, but it looked fixed, as if presented purely for the benefit of the photographers.

  The couple returned to England later that year and in October Charles rang me. I congratulated him on his marriage.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘Mahalia more or less saved my life as a matter of fact.’ He sounded as if he were debating in his mind whether this had been a good or a bad idea. Then he added: ‘To tell the truth, I’m still a bit run down. Can’t get about much. Would you mind coming down to Stanhill? One or two ideas I’d like to discuss with you.’

  I had absolutely no desire to become involved in any of Charles’s schemes, especially as my own career as a portrait artist was beginning to take off. I began to make excuses, but Charles sounded desperate. He almost pleaded with me. Eventually, I agreed to drive down for the day. I am afraid in the end I was more motivated by curiosity than by pity or sympathy.

  It was a wild, windy October day. As I drove down, wet yellowing leaves flattened themselves onto my windscreen and had to be scraped off with the wipers. When I turned into the Stanhill drive it was drizzling. The Guiting Yellow Cotswold stone of Stanhill Manor looked sickly under a grey and white sky. The green lawns were littered with dead leaves which twitched uneasily in the wind.

  The front door was open, so I walked in. Mahalia was in the hall sitting very upright at the big round rent table under the oriel window. There was no fire in the hearth and the hall felt damp and chilly, but Mahalia seemed impervious to the cold. On the table she was laying out Tarot cards in a formation known, I believe, as the Circle of Thoth. She was as slender and perfectly shaped as ever, but
there were little wriggles of white in her black frizzy hair, like wisps of smoke coiling up a black chimney. Her bronze skin was beginning to be scratched by dark wrinkles, especially round the eyes. She barely looked up when I came in.

  ‘Chaz is upstairs in his old room,’ she said. ‘I’m trying out a new deck. It’s the Egyptian Tarot.’

  ‘Ah. The Crowley pack.’

  ‘So! You know a little something about it, Mr Artist?’

  ‘ “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” ’

  ‘A-men!’ There was a pause while she turned a card over, then she said: ‘Run along now. Don’t keep my husband waiting.’

  I knew where Charles’s bedroom was, though I had never been inside it. As I climbed the stairs I noticed that there were cracks in the plastered walls. The house, never very well kept up, seemed more run down than before. In the passageway leading to Charles’s room a picture had fallen from its hook, its wire cord rusted away. It was propped disconsolately up against the wall. I bent down to examine it. Through the grime of age, a face peered out at me, oddly reminiscent of Charles with the same slightly crooked smile: evidently an ancestor.

  I knocked on his door and received a feeble summons to enter.

  I came into a big, oak panelled room, dominated by a great four poster bed. There were only two pictures on the walls: my sanguine drawings of Charles and Gloria, identically framed and mounted side by side on the panelling. They looked all wrong there: they had been hung far too close together.

  The hangings of the bed were of red damask and had once been very fine but age had faded the edges where they met the light and had torn parts of them to fluttering ribbons of silk. Couched in the bed, propped up on mountainous pillows and wrapped in a profusion of quilts and rugs was Charles.

  To say he did not look well would be an understatement. He was pale and sweaty. He looked shrunken, though this may have been an illusion created by the size of his bed, but at the same time his face had puffed out. The auburn curls, now thinner, clung lankly to his forehead. His eyes, deeper set, with a bluish tinge to the lids and sockets, wandered restlessly.

  But the thing that struck me most was the smell. The room smelt of sweat and decay and, as I thought, old men. I was reminded of when, as a child of seven or eight, I was taken to see my grandfather for the last time. He was lying in bed in the room at the top of our house, and what I remember most, apart from the vacancy of his rolling eyes, was the smell which ever since I have associated with senescence, decay and death. It was a smell of organic matter stale and curling at the edges, or slowly turning sour on a neglected window sill. It was there in Charles’s room.

  ‘Robert! Great to see you!’ he said. ‘Tell me all your news.’ For a while my presence animated him and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to tell him. He appeared particularly gratified when I informed him that Jenny and I were undergoing a trial separation.

  ‘Marriage is no good for artists. I’m not talking about Mahalia. She’s different.’ There was a pause while Charles breathed heavily, as if the act of listening to my gossip had exhausted him. Finally he beckoned to me to come closer to him on the bed. I approached reluctantly.

  ‘Robert, look, I want you to do me a favour. I want you to get me out of here.’ He was speaking in a lower voice, as if afraid of being overheard.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean get me out of this room. Get me into another. Any other. I can’t do it by myself, I’m too weak, and Mahalia for some reason won’t help.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it? Hasn’t this always been your room?’

  ‘Yes, yes! But didn’t you know? This was where Gloria took her overdose. She died in here. Robert, I’m shit scared. You must get me out of here.’

  ‘Are you afraid of her ghost or something?’

  ‘What? Good God, no! I don’t believe in all that rubbish.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘Exactly! Nothing! That’s what I’m afraid of. Gloria isn’t here. Nothing’s here!’

  ‘Then why are you afraid?’

  ‘Christ, are you thick or something? I don’t know why I’m afraid! I just am. Bloody Ada, do you need a reason to be terrified? Get me out of here! If I don’t get out, I’ll die here. Isn’t that reason enough? For fuck’s sake, get me out of here!’

  Charles put an arm around my shoulder and I eased him out of bed. Almost immediately his legs buckled under him, so that I was supporting his entire weight. I sat him on the bed while I found his slippers and dressing gown. Once again I was conscious of that old man smell of sweat and decay, only more intensely. I took his arm again and we started slowly, unsteadily towards the door. We were half way between the bed and the exit when the door opened. Mahalia stood on the threshold, the top of her head almost touching the lintel of the Georgian door frame.

  She said: ‘What in hell are you doing?’

  ‘Moving Charles to another room,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t seem to like this one.’

  ‘Did I say you could do that?’

  During the silence that followed Charles, unassisted, staggered back into bed, white and shaking. It would not have surprised me if I had known then that this was the last time I was to see him alive.

  She said: ‘He does not leave this room till I say so.’

  ‘But he can’t stand it in here.’

  ‘Why? He’s got nothing to fear. You said so yourself.’ Had she been listening at the door?

  ‘So you’re just going to keep him here, against his will?’

  ‘You bet your ass,’ said Lady Mahalia Purefoy.

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE DAMNED

  There was a time before the Great War when Petropol was the most fashionable resort in the Crimea. If you arrived by steamer, you would have disembarked onto a stone jetty that extended a long grey arm into the oily smooth waters of the Black Sea. Having made your way along this you would have encountered a row of open carriages awaiting you on the broad esplanade which curved in an elegant parabola around the bay. Before conducting you and your baggage to your hotel, their drivers, unless expressly ordered not to do so, would have taken you on a tour of the town of which they were justifiably proud.

  Petropol had been laid out somewhat in the French style, with wide, tree-lined boulevards. Princes and Archdukes owned high-walled villas by the sea while their yachts rode at anchor in the bay. The poorer districts lay in the foothills behind the town where no-one but the poor needed to visit them. There was a little casino, like a miniature palace made out of pink sugar, a monumental and severely classical town hall and the famous Botanical Gardens whose collection of rare plants was said to have been unmatched east of the Carpathians. Lovers of pleasure might resort to the celebrated—some would say notorious—Turkish Bath House; and lovers of the arts would undoubtedly be directed to the Imperial Opera House in St Basil’s Square. This was an imposing neo-Baroque construction faced with white marble whose green copper dome was surmounted by a gilded statue of winged Victory.

  All these features were still there in 1919, but they had lost their lustre, and some of their function. The elegant promenades and gardens were no longer thronged with fashionable leisure-seekers, aristocrats and the higher grades of the Imperial Russian Civil Service with their families on holiday. Those happy and prosperous times had existed little more than five years before, but already they were beginning to seem like a generation away.

  They certainly did to Asmatov, the manager of the Imperial Opera House, so much so that he sometimes wondered half seriously if the good times had been a figment of his imagination. Then he would look round his office and see the posters. Here was a visit from the Mariensky Opera Company in Carmen and Boris Godunov; there was the Bolshoi with The Nutcracker or Swan Lake. Ismailov had played Hamlet here; and the great Eleonora Duse herself had once appeared on his stage as D’Annunzio’s La Gioconda. She had played the rôle of course in her native Italian; nevertheless the citizens of Petro
pol had packed the theatre and shown their sophistication by declaring her performance ‘exquisite’.

  In 1919 no European theatre company would have ventured within a hundred miles of Petropol. Companies from the great cities of Moscow or Petersburg (or was it now Petrograd?) were not venturing this far south if they were venturing at all. A civil war whose politics and strategies baffled the citizens of Petropol was raging. For some months the town had been nominally in the hands of the White Russians but nobody had troubled to inform the Petropolitans and they had been reluctant to enquire too deeply into the matter. They tried to go about their business as normally as possible and waited for events in the larger world to take them wherever the larger world wanted them to go.

  Meanwhile the Imperial Opera House stood there in St Basil’s Square like a great white wedding cake waiting to be eaten, and the Petropolitans needed to be entertained from time to time. Asmatov did his best with the very limited pool of local talent among singers, musicians and performers at his disposal, but they were not a great success. He made some money by hiring out the theatre to political rallies and meetings of one kind or another. One by one he had to dismiss his faithful staff so that by the beginning of November of that year he was left only with his faithful Matriona, who ran the ticket office, and old Sivorin, keeper of the stage door and general factotum.

  Asmatov was a smallish, stout, bald man with no obviously remarkable outward qualities. He dressed neatly; he kept his moustache in order; he was scrupulously punctual and polite. He was, above all, a man who believed in preserving his self respect, even, and indeed especially, in these times of uncertainty. Every morning, having breakfasted with his wife and daughter in their apartment opposite the Opera House, he would take himself across the square to his office in the theatre. The citizens of Petropol, seeing his neat, round figure in its black swallow tailed coat, as he strutted across St Basil’s Square, felt reassured. They knew they could set their watches by him and that, as soon as he had mounted the steps of the theatre and touched the door handle of the great glass panelled front portals, the hour of nine would strike. And so it did that morning in November of the year 1919.