‘We want ask her,’ said Kitty, who was at the stage when she toed her elder sister’s party line religiously.
‘Perhaps she’ll tell you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But just now she’s very very tired.’
‘Then why is she talking to Mum in the spare room?’ asked Isobel.
This was unanswerable, so I read them a story until they fell asleep.
After that, I went downstairs, made myself and Anne a cup of tea, and, when Anne didn’t come, drank them both myself. I watched television listlessly for a while and then went to bed. I was still not asleep when Anne came in shortly after one o’clock. She sat down heavily on the bed with the words: ‘Your Mr Poo-Poo is an absolute monster.’
‘He’s not my Mr Poo-Poo,’ I said, but she ignored this and began to undress. I asked: ‘What has he been doing? Knocking her about or something?
‘No. Not exactly. But he makes demands.’ There was a moment when Anne hesitated before breaking Magda’s confidence. ‘You won’t tell anyone else?’
‘Good God, no!’
‘He wants it all the time, apparently. I won’t go into details — they’re too horrible — but he wants it at least once a night, and sometimes he’ll demand it in the middle of the day if he’s at home. I mean Magda’s a perfectly healthy, normal girl, but she just can’t stand it. And he won’t take no for an answer.’
‘You mean he rapes her?’
‘Not strictly speaking, but to all intents. He puts her under such pressure. She’s terrified of him.’
‘Good God!’
‘I know, and she has begun to find him physically repulsive. Yes, of course he never was a thing of beauty, but I genuinely think there was some sort of a mutual attraction at first. She wasn’t just looking for a meal ticket. And he’s pretty horrible in other ways, too. He likes to control everything she does: when she does the washing, when she cleans the flat, what she buys at the shops, even what she wears. He’s incredibly mean with money, and sometimes, when he’s out doing a whole day of TV-extra work, he locks her in the flat so she can’t get out at all.’
‘How did she get away?’
‘Fire escape.’
Anne and I discussed the situation into the early hours and decided, though we could barely afford it, to re-employ Magda as an au pair and let her stay until she could find somewhere else to go. Kitty and Isobel were for some reason delighted, but I noted that the relationship between them and Magda was different to what it had been. She had become more their servant than their nanny, but their tyranny was light. Despite all our protests they insisted on calling Magda ‘Mrs Poo-Poo’, which she bore stoically, even cheerfully.
Two days later, at six in the evening, the telephone rang, and I answered it in the hallway.
‘Is Magda there?’ said a voice I had half expected. It was Mr Poo-Poo. I hesitated. ‘Before you commit the sin of lying,’ he went on, ‘I ought to say, I have been watching the house. I do know she’s there.’
I asked him what he wanted.
‘I want to speak to Magda.’
‘She may not want to speak to you.’
‘She is my wife,’ said Mr Poo-Poo. By this time Magda had appeared at the top of the stairs. Covering the mouthpiece of the phone I asked her if she wanted to speak to her husband. She shook her head violently, then made a curious gesture with her right hand as if she were warding off some evil.
‘She doesn’t want to speak to you,’ I said.
‘I’m not giving up. She has gone astray and I must call her back. But just tell her this. Tell her that she is running the risk of eternal hell fire. Tell her. Hell is not a joke.’ Then he rang off.
Magda came down stairs.
‘What did my husband say?’ she asked. I mumbled something. ‘He talk about Hell?’ I nodded. Magda looked at me defiantly. ‘I tell you,’ she said, ‘I do not give this about Mr Poo-Poo’s hell!’ and she snapped her fingers. It was a typical Magda reaction — forthright, bold, uncomplicated — but her voice had cracked as she spoke.
The following day, at exactly the same time, the telephone rang again. Mr Poo-Poo was a creature of method. He said he wanted to speak to Magda, and I said that I would not let him speak to Magda unless she wanted to speak to him. He asked if I had passed on to her his message about hell, and I said yes, because after a fashion I had.
‘I am only warning her of what will come to pass,’ said Mr Poo-Poo. ‘That is the punishment, you see, that God has reserved for the evildoer. I have been told what will happen. Ours is a charismatic church, and there are those who speak in tongues, and there are those who have visions laid on them. This woman in our church, Mrs Harris — but we call her Sister Bernice — she had a vision laid on her about the End Times, the coming Judgement, and about hell. Sister Bernice is very close to Christ, and her message is a warning from Jesus about the wages of sin. She said she had a vision of hell. She said it’s like a great pit, all dark, and miles deep. Like thousands of miles. And there’s this thing in the pit which is built up high, so high, but it never reaches out of the darkness; and this thing is like a great house or a block of flats, only it’s made of sticks. Little sticks, like twigs. It’s made of millions of twigs, and there are all these rooms in it, and thousands of passages, all twig. And in the little twig rooms live the damned. And they can move from one room to another through the passages, but they can never get out. They can climb up the twig stairs and along the passages, but they can never get out if they go up or down or sideways. The damned are always living there, but then someone starts a fire. And it’s like panic, and everyone is running along these passages made of sticks to escape, but the passages start burning and falling into each other. And people are burning, and like frying and bubbling up — Sister Bernice said she saw all this in her vision — but there’s no fainting or dying because people there are dying forever, and there’s no relief from the pain because there’s no anaesthetics in hell. And they run and run and there’s just more little rooms and passages, all made of twigs and sticks. And they all burn in the end. Pastor Jim says that in like the olden days, the born again Christians used to put a cat in like a wicker basket, and put it over a fire. And I know that’s supposed to be cruel, but the cat was like the symbol of the devil, and the screams of the cat was like reminding them of the sounds the damned might make in hell, and how the cat was caught in the burning basket like forever and——’
At this point I managed to summon up enough willpower to put down the phone.
I told no one in the house about Mr Poo-Poo’s call, but the following day I found the number of the Peniel Gospel Church in the phone book, rang it, and asked to speak to Pastor Jim. He was aware of the situation. Despite a great deal of talk about him ‘understanding exactly’ how I felt, it was clear that he was fully behind Mr Poo-Poo. I told him about Mr Poo-Poo’s obsession with hell. Pastor Jim was unsympathetic.
‘I realise that to a liberal intellectual like yourself the word ‘hell’ is either a joke or a swear word,’ said Pastor Jim — filling the phrase ‘liberal intellectual’ with all the withering contempt that those who are neither habitually feel towards those whom they consider to be both — ‘but to us simple folk who live in the real world it is a very serious thing. Eternal damnation is no joke, believe you me. I am not going to criticise anyone who loves his wife so much that he wants to save her from being damned to all eternity.’
Like most arguments based firmly on false premises, this was hard to answer, so I didn’t. That evening I waited for the telephone to ring, but it did not. The following morning I noticed that a letter had come for Magda. The envelope was hand-written in pale purple biro. It did not look like a masculine hand, but the post code was Stoke Newington, so I stood by Magda as she opened it. Inside was a single, lined sheet of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook. On it was written:
At the prayer meeting last night, many of us spoke in tongues, and I had laid on me this word of prophesy:
‘The Day o
f Judgement is nigh. If you don’t return, you’ll burn.
‘Sister Bernice.’
‘This Sister Bernice, I know her,’ said Magda. ‘She is not right in the head’; and she tore up the paper.
The following day three letters came from Stoke Newington, the addresses hand-written in brown felt tip pen. In Magda’s envelope was a plain piece of paper on which was scrawled: ‘It is better to marry than to burn. I Corinthians 7. v.9’. The other two envelopes were addressed to my daughters Kitty and Isobel. As they too obviously came from Mr Poo-Poo I opened them, fearing the worst; but the contents simply baffled me. Inside each envelope was a piece of paper on which had been drawn, in the same brown felt tip pen, a criss-cross of lines. I could not think what they meant, except, I suppose, they might possibly be intended to represent a heap of sticks or twigs.
During the next week our family seemed to be afflicted by lethargy and ill luck. Neither Anne nor I wanted to attribute this to anything other than one of those periodic downturns of fortune to which everyone is subject. It was exacerbated by my own irritability at losing a job of which I had been almost certain. I preferred to brood in private rather than share my frustration, but this only increased the tension. The children began to have nightmares, to which they were not normally prone. Magda was taciturn and stoical. Both Anne and I noticed that the electric lights in the house were dimmer than they should be, and that a more than usual number of light bulbs were expiring. An electrician was called in but could offer no explanation or remedy.
Then, on the Saturday morning — it was late August — we woke to see a sky of heavy unbroken cloud. It was as if a great grey eiderdown had been stretched across London. It brooded over the red brick, late nineteenth century bank clerk’s houses of Queen’s Park, creating a strange, stuffy, indoor effect, as confined and cluttered as a Victorian parlour. The drapery of clouds hung low, moving slowly across the scene, but releasing not a drop of water, and the pressure of the atmosphere held our heads in a steady, aching grip, like a pair of tongs applied to the temples. In the afternoon I remember looking out our landing window onto the garden below and longing for rain. All the foliage seemed dull and dusty under the grey sky. My attention was drawn to a brown patch in the middle of the lawn, about a foot or so in diameter. From where I was I could not make it out. It might have been an animal had it not been so immobile — a dead animal? The unfamiliar thing annoyed me, so I went downstairs and into the garden to investigate.
It was not an animal, living or dead, and it was not something which should have filled me with fear, but it did. It was a neat pile of dead twigs and sticks, arranged in a little tumulus as if in preparation for a bonfire. I picked up the lot, disregarding the thorns on some of the twigs which made me bleed, and crammed it into a dustbin; then I went indoors to phone Mr Poo-Poo.
He was out, so I shouted instead into his answering machine until the thing beeped and terminated my call. I cannot remember all that I said, but I am sure I was incoherent, and must have sounded mad. I did tell him to stop threatening us.
I have no idea how I spent the rest of the day, but I do remember that the weather had not broken by the time we went to bed. I fell into a thick, heavy sleep which was interrupted only a couple of hours later by the sound of thunder. This might have been a relief had it not been punctuated by the screams of our children. Anne, for some unaccountable reason, was still wrapped in sleep, so I leapt out of bed and ran to their room.
Kitty and Isobel were sitting bolt upright and staring at the window opposite them. the curtains had been opened since we said goodnight. In the small second before I turned towards what they were looking at out of the window I was aware of a sudden and complete silence. There was no thunder, no distant noise of London traffic, nothing. When I looked at the window I saw through it what I could not, should not have seen.
In a pale lustreless light I saw that a great structure was raised that went up miles high and went down miles below into the infinite darkness. It was a great tower of Babel, like those depicted in old paintings, or books of Bible stories, except that it was not made of stone, it was made of a great network of twigs and sticks. Trapped in this monstrous basket weave of chambers and crooked corridors was an infinite number of living creatures, some human, some mammalian, some birdlike, but all of them pale, naked, hairless, and featherless with open, haunted eyes. I thought some saw me and stretched out feeble, attenuated limbs towards me in supplication — because they were not only trapped, they were beginning to burn. In a hundred places, then a thousand, then a million, flames began to flicker. Parts of the structure started to crumble and collapse as the flames took hold. The creatures struggled in their tangles of burning sticks and let out silent cries. They tried to claw their way from one web of burning wreckage to another, but they did nothing but fall, and fall on other burning creatures. Now the whole structure seemed alight and full of agony and chaos, but still it held to its monstrous height and depth. I tried to call out — on what? on a merciful God? — but no sound came. Then there was a bang and a flash, a great roar of rain, and the vision vanished, to be replaced by darkness and the sparkle of drops and rivulets of rain on the window. Isobel and Kitty began to scream again and I ran to comfort them.
The following morning I found Magda standing in the hall with her bags packed. She said: ‘I am doing no good here. I go back to Mr Poo-Poo.’ I somehow knew that all Anne’s and my protests would have no effect.
‘I prefer to go to Mr Poo-Poo than go to hell,’ she said.
Anne said, ‘You don’t really believe that do you, Magda?’ Magda shrugged her shoulders. I said that the least we could do was to drive her back to Stoke Newington, so she rang Mr Poo-Poo to inform him of her return. From what I could gather by standing near the phone as Magda spoke to him, Mr Poo-Poo was not in the least surprised by her decision. He said he would wait in for her.
When we arrived at Mr Poo-Poo’s flat in Stoke Newington, I having followed Magda’s curt, precise instructions, she told me to park on the other side of the road from the house where his flat was situated. She got out of the car without a word, her belongings in a suitcase that we had given to her as a leaving present.
I did not drive off immediately. From my car I watched Magda cross the street and ring the front door bell. There was a long wait, then the door was opened wide by Mr Poo-Poo. He was wearing a buff cardigan and a pair of green trousers very well pressed, with a crease at the front as sharp as a knife. He had put on weight. There was no expression on his face and he offered her no greeting. She entered the dark hall with bowed head, carrying her suitcase unaided. Then he closed the street door behind her.
We heard no more of either of them. Occasionally, with a twitch of guilt, Anne would say, ‘I wonder how the Poo-Poos are getting on.’ I think she used the name deliberately, so that Nicky and Magda Beale would somehow cease to be real people. She was relegating them to a comic mythology of the past because there was, after all, nothing we could do about them, or so we told ourselves.
* * * * *
Just over a year later, one dark, rainy evening in November, I went to fetch my second daughter Kitty from a children’s party in Notting Hill Gate. When I rang the bell I was confronted by the usual harassed mother who said, ‘Come in. You’re a little early. The entertainer is still doing his stuff.’
I could hear that a raucous time was being had in the big drawing room off the main hall. I would have preferred to have sat peacefully in the hall, and perhaps chatted with the lady of the house, but she had not the time nor the patience for this. She chivvied me into the sitting room, where I joined a small knot of other attendant parents.
Our offspring, seated on the white shag pile carpet in front of us, were watching an old fashioned Punch and Judy show, never a form of theatre that has appealed to me. Mr Punch, hugging a great stick in his stumpy little arms, was smashing Judy about with tremendous vigour, and the children were responding with squeals of delight. Emblazoned on the
red and white striped awning that hung down from the puppet stage were the words:
Mr POO-POO
It is extraordinary how the body takes over at moments like these. Before my conscious mind had digested this information, it seemed to me, my heart was knocking and the sour taste of fear was in my mouth. Why? I was in no way threatened. Did I imagine that Kitty, sitting in the front row of the audience, was being corrupted? Punch and Judy was certainly a new addition to Mr Poo-Poo’s repertoire as an entertainer, and it was one at which he had gained a ghastly expertise.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ shrieked Mr Poo-Poo through his swozzle, as Mr Punch gave Judy another tremendous crack with the bludgeon. The children cried out with joy. The strange inhuman distortion of Mr Poo-Poo’s voice brought to mind the mechanised, metallic tones of the Minikoits in Jupiter 5.
To the right and behind the puppet stage a woman was sitting very still and upright on a dining chair, her back to the wall. At her feet was a child asleep in a carry-cot. I wondered who she was. The au pair of the house? Then I recognised Magda. She had not been easy to identify, because everything about her had changed; all colour had gone from her face and clothing, and even the darkness of her lustrous eyes had lost its intensity.
I smiled at her and she pretended not to see me, but I was sure she had. The moment I endeavoured to make eye contact she had looked away and then down at the child. Evidently it was hers, because I recognised that intense gaze of concentrated love with which a mother looks at her own baby. For a moment it wiped the gloom from her face. She twitched at the blankets of the baby’s cot but otherwise made no movement. Above her the little proscenium of Mr Poo-Poo’s puppet stage gaped like the mouth of Hell.
The Silver Cord
Yet, with his inward eye, the city dweller may still step out upon the ancient causeways of England where once the Legions tramped with measured feet from Roman Caerleon to Aque Solia; or dwell unhindered by a stream that dashes in secret haste down between rock and tree from a spring deep within the hollow hills.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 9
