‘Never got to the ’varsity myself,’ said de Walter. ‘I was due to go up in ’15, but a certain Kaiser Bill put the kibosh on that.’
The First World War was ancient history to me, a series of faded sepia snapshots of mud-filled trenches and Dreadnoughts, cutting through the foggy wastes of the North Sea, a tinkle of ‘Tipperary’ on a rickety church piano. Trying to imagine a young de Walter going to war all those years ago silenced me.
‘Do you have children yourself, Mr and Mrs de Walter?’ my mother asked.
There was an unpleasant little silence. My father, who was frequently embarrassed by my mother’s forthrightness, passed a hand through his thinning hair, a familiar gesture of nervous exasperation. The broken veins in de Walter’s face had turned it a very ugly shade of dark purple. Mrs de Walter seemed about to say something when her husband restrained her by tightly grasping one of her stick-like arms.
‘No,’ said de Walter in a lower, firmer voice than we had hitherto heard, ‘we have not been blessed with that inestimable privilege.’ There was another pause before he added: ‘We couldn’t, you see. War wound.’
With old world courtesy, he cut off my mother’s abject apologies for raising the issue. ‘Please, dear lady,’ he said. ‘Let us say no more on the subject.’ Soon we were discussing the present state of English cricket in which de Walter took a passionate interest, even if he could not quite grasp that Denis Compton was no longer saving England from the defeat at the hands of the Australians, or some people whom he called ‘the fuzzy-wuzzies.’ My father, an enthusiast whose information was rather more up-to-date, was able to correct some of de Walter’s misapprehensions, while Mrs de Walter told my mother how she had all her clothes made up and sent over to Portugal by her dressmaker in England. Everything passed off so amicably that we found ourselves being asked to take lunch with the de Walters the following day at the Villa Monte Rosa.
The next day a taxi delivered us to a pair of rusty wrought iron gates in the pleasantly unspoilt hill village of Monte Rosa. The gates were situated in a high stone wall which surrounded what looked like extensive grounds; a drive from the gates curved into the leafy obscurity of palm and pine trees, and other overgrown vegetation. We were about to push open the gate when down the drive came a wiry middle-aged woman in overalls. Her head was tied up in a bandana and she had a narrow, deeply lined face, the colour and consistency of an old pigskin wallet. Silently, with an attempt at a smile on her face, she shook our hands, then gestured us to follow her up the drive.
The grounds were not well kept, if they were kept at all, but we saw enough of them to guess that they had once been laid out and planted on a lavish scale. Once or twice through some dense and abandoned screen of leaf I caught a glimpse of a lichened piece of classical statuary on a plinth. Then we turned a corner and had our first sight of the Villa Monte Rosa.
It looked to me like a miniature palace made out of pink sugar. Both my parents were entranced by it, but, as they told me later, in slightly different ways. To my father the ornate neo-baroque design evoked a vanished world of elegant Edwardian hedonism. Had it been only a little more extensive, it could have passed for a small casino. To my mother this rose-coloured folly, encroached on all sides by deep, undisciplined vegetation, was a fairy-tale abode of the Sleeping Beauty. It reminded her of illustrations by Edmond Dulac and Arthur Rackham in the books of her childhood.
The de Walters were there to greet us on the steps that led up to the entrance portico. Lunch, simple and elegant, was served to us on the terrace by the woman who had escorted us up the drive. She was their housekeeper and her name was Maria. The terrace was situated at the back of the villa and looked down a gentle incline towards the sea in the distance. What must once have been a magnificent view was now all but obscured by the pine trees through which flashes of azure tantalised the spectator. Mrs de Walter informed us proudly that the Villa Monte Rosa had been built in the 1890s by a Russian Prince for his ballerina mistress. It might not have been true, but it was plausible.
The conversation did not greatly interest me. It consisted largely of a monologue on wine from de Walter, who obviously considered himself an aficionado. Though my father knew more than enough to keep up with him, he had the journalist’s knack of displaying a little judicious ignorance. My mother and Mrs de Walter, who appeared to have less in common, sporadically discussed the weather and the flowers in the garden of the Villa Monte Rosa. After lunch Maria wheeled out a metal trolley on which a large selection of ports and unusual liqueurs were displayed. De Walter proposed a tasting to my parents and then turned to me.
‘Why don’t you go and explore the grounds, young feller? We won’t mind. We’ll hold the fort for you here, what? All boys like exploring, don’t they? Eh?’ This project appealed to me and was acceptable to my parents.
‘Don’t get lost!’ said my mother.
‘It’s all right,’ said de Walter with a raucous laugh. ‘We’ll send out search parties if you do!’
So I walked down the shallow steps of the terrace and into the gardens of the Villa Monte Rosa. After crossing a small oval lawn with a lily pond at its centre, I took a serpentine path which led down through shrubberies. Great tropical fronds stooped over me. The gravel path was riven with weeds, and more than once I tripped over a thin green limb of vegetation that had clawed its way across it in search of nourishment. I imagined myself to be an archaeologist uncovering the remains of a lost civilisation.
It is often a great shock to find one’s fantasy life confirmed by reality. I came down into a dell to find a structure consisting of a statue in a niche above a stone basin in the shape of a shell. It looked like the fountain at the gate of some ancient city. The statue was of a naked woman, lichened and weather worn, holding a jar, tilted downwards, from which, water had once fallen into the basin, which had been dry for a long while. The figure, I now think, was probably modelled on Ingres’ La Source, which made it mid to late nineteenth century in origin. On its pedestal was carved the word DANAIDE. This meant something to me even then. I knew from the simple gobbets of Greek prose that I was beginning to study that the Danaids, because they murdered their husbands, had been condemned to fill leaky vessels for all eternity in Hades, the Land of the Dead.
I stared for a long time at this ancient conceit, turning its significance over in my mind but coming to no conclusion, until eventually I decided to follow the path round it and travel further down the slope. After a few minutes I came to another clearing, where I received my second and more prodigious shock.
Within a little amphitheatre of box and yew, both rampant and unpruned, was a hard floor of grassless grit, in which was built out of smooth, dressed stones a low circular wall that I took to be the mouth of a well. On the wall sat a pale, fair-haired boy of about my age. He wore grey flannel shorts and a white flannel shirt, of the kind I was made to wear out of doors in the summer at my school. We stared at each other for a long while: to me he was horribly unexpected.
One reason why I spent so long looking at him was that I could not quite make out what I was seeing. He was a perfectly proportioned flesh and blood boy in all respects but one. He seemed smaller than he should be, not by much but by enough to make him seem deformed in some subtle way. As he sat on the wall his feet dangled a foot or so above the ground, when they should have touched it, but he was not dwarfish: his legs were not bowed or stunted; his head was not too big for his body. Apart from the extreme pallor of his skin and hair, he was, I suppose, rather a handsome boy. I could have come closer to him to confirm my suspicions about his size, but I did not want to.
‘Hello,’ I said; then recollecting that the boy, his appearance notwithstanding, was almost certainly Portuguese, I said: ‘Bom Dir.’
‘You’re not Portugoose, are you?’ said the boy. ‘You’re English.’
‘Yes,’ I said. He had a voice like mine. He belonged to the middle classes. He asked me my name. I told him, and he said his name was Hal.
/> ‘Hal what?’ I asked.
‘Just Hal.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘What are you doing here?’
I told him, and then I said it was his turn to tell.
‘I come here sometimes,’ he said.
‘Do Mr and Mrs de Walter know?’
‘Of course they do, you ass,’ said Hal. ‘Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? Mind your own beeswax!’ Mind your own beeswax. It was a piece slang I had heard once or twice at my school, but even there it had seemed dated, culled perhaps from a reading of Billy Bunter or Stalky & Co.
Hal asked me about my school, in particular about games. I boasted as much as I could about my distinctly average abilities, and my exploits in the third eleven at cricket. He kept his eyes fixed on me, but I wondered how much he was taking in.
He said: ‘When I grow up I’m going to be a cricketer, like Wally Hammond.’
‘Who’s Wally Hammond?’ I asked.
‘Crikey, don’t you know who Wally Hammond is? You are of blockheads the most crassly ignoramus.’
‘Is he a cricketer?’
‘Is he a cricketer? Of course he’s a cricketer, you utterly frabjous oaf! Don’t you know anything?’ As I was one of those boys who had learned by heart the names of the entire England cricket team together with their bowling and batting averages, I took great offence at this. Later in our conversation I slipped in a reference to Geoffrey Boycott. Hal said: ‘Boycott what?’ I did not reply, but I felt vindicated.
It was not long after this that I began to feel that my company was no longer a pleasure to Hal. Something about his eyes were not quite right. They seemed to be darker than when I had first seen them, not only the irises and pupils, but the whites had turned a greyish colour. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light which may also account for the fact that he was beginning to look even smaller.
Suddenly he said: ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘Who are you for that matter, and what are you doing here?’ I said, taking a step towards him.
‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘Private Property!’
The sound of his cry rang in my ears. I turned from him and ran up the path to the top of the slope. When I had reached it I turned again and looked back. Hal was still sitting there on the lip of the old well, his heels banging against the stones. He was facing in my direction but I could not tell whether he was looking at me or not. The light, which was not quite right in that strange garden, had turned his eye sockets into empty black holes. I turned again and ran: this time I did not look back.
For some time I found that I was lost. In that dense foliage I could not tell which way was the sea and which way the Villa Monte Rosa. I remember some agonising minutes during which I could not stop myself from going round in a circle. I kept coming back to the same small stone statue of a cat crouching on a plinth. It was perhaps the tomb of a pet, but there was no inscription. I began to panic. The cat looked as if it were about to spring. I decided that the only way of escape was to ignore the paths and move resolutely in one direction.
Surprisingly enough this worked, and in a matter of minutes I found I was walking across the little lawn towards the terrace where my parents were. I was about to set foot on the steps to the terrace when I saw Mrs de Walter at the top of them, scrutinising me intently. She came down to meet me.
‘So you’ve found your way back,’ she said. ‘We were beginning to wonder if you were lost.’
I shook my head. She laid her thin hand lightly on my shoulder.
‘Did you meet anyone on your travels?’ she asked. It was a curious way of expressing herself, and I was wary. ‘You did, didn’t you?’
I nodded. It seemed the course of least resistance.
‘A little boy?’
I nodded again.
‘An English little boy?’
I gave her the same response. The pressure of her hand on my shoulder became so great that I imagined I could feel the bones in her fingers through my thin shirt, or was it the cords of her strange crocheted mittens? She said: ‘We won’t mention the little English boy to anyone else, shall we? Not even our parents. This shall be our personal secret, shan’t it?’
I was quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.
‘Come!’ said Mrs de Walter. ‘I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!’ Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise round the villa to a part of it which I had not seen, a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.
‘We call this the orangery,’ she said. ‘But it’s many years since anyone grew oranges here.’ She took out a key and turned it in the lock of a door made from grey and wrinkled wood, to which a few flakes and blisters of green paint still adhered.
‘Who is Hal?’ I asked Mrs De Walter.
‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘There are some things here which I’m sure will amuse you.’
We entered a long, dingy space feebly lit by the tall dirty windows that faced onto the garden. At the far end of the orangery was a curtain of faded green damask drawn across a dark space, and along the wall which faced the windows was ranged a series of rectangular glass cases set on legs at a height convenient to the spectator.
‘These are bound to amuse you,’ said Mrs de Walter. ‘All boys like you are amused by these.’ Her insistence on my reaction was beginning to make me nervous.
At first I thought that the glass cases simply contained stuffed animals of the kind I had seen in museums, but when I was placed firmly in front of one I saw that this was not quite so. There were stuffed animals certainly, but they were all mice, rats, and other rodents, and they had been put into human postures and settings.
The first tableau depicted the oak panelled parlour of an old-fashioned inn. A red squirrel in an apron was halfway through a door, bearing a tray of bottles, glasses, and foaming tankards of ale. At a table sat four or five rats and a white mouse. Playing cards were scattered over the table and on the floor. The white mouse was looking disconsolately away towards the viewer, while the rats seemed to be gloating over the piles of coin which had accumulated on their side of the table. The white mouse wore an elegant embroidered sash of primrose coloured silk, while perching on one of the finials of his chair back was an extravagantly plumed hat. The setting and costume accessories suggested the Carolean period. Two moles wearing spectacles and Puritan steeple hats were watching the proceedings with disapproval from a corner table. It was clear that the rats had gulled the wealthy but innocent young mouse out of his cash at cards.
The tableau looked as if it had been made in the Victorian era and had, I am sure, been designed to amuse, as Mrs de Walter kept reminding me; but there was something dusty and oppressive about the atmosphere it evoked. Perhaps it was the implied moralism of the display, a sort of Rodent Rake’s Progress, that disheartened me.
In the second case the scene was set outside the inn. The two moles were now observing the action from an open first floor casement window to the right of the inn sign, which bore the image of a skull and a trumpet. On the road in front of the inn a brawl was taking place between the white mouse and one of the rats. Both were being urged on by groups of their fellow rodents, the mice being smaller obviously, but more elegantly equipped with plumed hats and rapiers swinging from their tasselled baldrics. The rats had a proletarian look about them and had leather rather than silk accoutrements.
The third tableau was set in a forest clearing, where the mouse and his comrades had just ambushed the rat with whom he had been brawling in the previous scene. The mouse was plunging a rapier into the belly of the rat, which was now in its death throes. I was slightly surprised by the graphic way in which the creator of these scenes had shown the blood. It surrounded the gaping wound which the mouse had created; there was a dark viscous pool of the stuff on the yellow soil beneath its body an
d great splashes of it on the mouse’s white fur. One could just see the faces of the two moles peeping out from a dense belt of undergrowth to one side.
The final glass case depicted a courtroom, presided over by an owl judge. Other participants were all rodents of one kind or another. The white mouse, his coat still faintly stained with blood, stood in the spike-hedged dock between two burly ferret policemen. A rat in a wig was interrogating one of the moles, whose head was just visible above the wooden sides of the witness box. The entire jury was composed of rats and, as if to confirm the inevitable outcome of the trial, I noticed that a small square of black cloth already reposed upon the owl’s flat head.
‘I thought these would amuse you,’ said Mrs de Walter, who was standing behind me. I started. In my absorption I had quite forgotten her presence. Amused was not the word, but I was held by a morbid fascination. These scenes with their lurid subject matter and their dusty gallows humour, were redolent of long-forgotten illustrated books and savage Victorian childhoods.
‘Ah! But you haven’t seen behind the curtain, have you?’ said Mrs de Walter with a dreadful attempt at a roguish smile. It was then that I became very much afraid. I can only account for the suddenness of my panic by the fact that uneasiness had built it up inside me over the course of the afternoon, that it had reached a critical mass, and was now in danger of erupting into sheer terror. One thought dominated — I must not see behind the curtain — and yet, at the same time, I knew I could not look away. Mrs de Walter appeared to take all this in, but she showed neither concern with, nor indifference to, my state of mind, only a kind of intense curiosity. She bent down and looked directly into my eyes.
‘I wonder if you should see this one. It might shock you.’ She approached the curtain and put one hand on it so that in an instant she could pull it aside. There was a pause before she asked me a question.
‘Are you by any chance a pious sort of a boy?’
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 6
