‘See what you can make of this, but take care! It is an original manuscript, probably the only one in existence.’
The paper was good but ancient and yellowing. The writing on it, in faded sepia ink, was in a refined late eighteenth century hand. On the first page was written:
Le couvent d’Astaroth, ou Les malheurs de l’innocence
par D. A. F. Marquis de S.
As Jones speculated on his coming ordeal with ‘The Convent of Astaroth, or the Misfortunes of Innocence’, Mr Honeyburn was putting twenty gold sovereigns into a leather purse for him. He said: ‘Twenty more if you finish by the end of the month. Do not seek me out again. I will send word to arrange a meeting.’ Jones, with a pious thought for Mary and the child, took the purse, the manuscript, and his leave of Mr Honeyburn.
Le couvent d’Astaroth proved to be worse even than Amélie, ou Les cent caresses du Charnier. Amélie, it was true, detailed more and fouler incidents, but Le couvent d’Astaroth presented itself as a work of philosophy. In between recounting acts of unspeakable cruelty, it set out a creed so vile and heartless that Jones had to force his pen to render it into clear English. Every instinct recoiled at the refined barbarism in which it luxuriated; at the same time Jones found himself bored by the self-opinionated prosing of the author, who evidently thought himself a Rousseau or a Voltaire. Jones did not persevere with it simply for the jingle of sovereigns in his pocket, but out of an obscure sense of destiny. When he had completed the work he knew he would be sent for, at which time something would happen to change his situation. And so it was that, a few days after he had finished the translation, a telegram came from Mr Honeyburn asking him to meet him in his chambers in Lupton Court at eleven o’clock that night.
* * * * *
The front door of Lupton Court was open, the ancient porter nowhere to be seen. Jones felt his way blindly in the gloom up to the room on the first floor.
The books had gone. The room was empty, save for a table and two chairs on one of which, facing the door, sat Mr Honeyburn. He and his surroundings were lit by a single oil lamp which stood on the table, which was otherwise bare except for an object which lay next to the lamp. Jones could not tell what it was, but it was long and made of some dark material which glittered. The unexpected nakedness of the room alarmed Jones.
‘What has happened? Why has everything gone?’ he asked.
‘Is that any business of yours?’ said Mr Honeyburn. Despite the fact that part of his face was in shadow, or perhaps because of it, Mr Honeyburn exuded a greater presence than ever before. It came from him in waves like a pungent scent. It had no personhood, but was like the ancient natural power of a tumbling torrent, a hurricane wind, or a mountain that splits apart and spews forth red lava.
‘Do you have any work for me?’ said Jones.
‘I have. But not translation.’
‘I am glad to hear it.’
‘You did not care for the last work that I gave you?’
‘Is that any business of yours?’ said Jones, throwing the manuscript on to the table. Mr Honeyburn smiled and nodded almost imperceptibly.
‘Mr Jones,’ he said, ‘you have a task to perform. You must cut your silver cord.’ Jones looked at him in astonishment. ‘I think you know what I mean. I will give you the instrument with which to perform it, but the rest of the work is yours.’
‘You mean — Jocelyn Slade?’
Instead of answering him directly, Mr Honeyburn picked up the glittering object from the table and handed it to Jones. It was a stone knife made of some dark, glassy, faintly translucent material: obsidian, he suspected. The blade had been delicately knapped to form an edge as sharp as any razor. The handle was smooth and easily grasped; some sort of skin or hide had been wound round it to give a better grip.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Honeyburn, as if in answer to Jones’s unspoken question. ‘It is very ancient and has been used many times.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘To sever the silver cord,’ said Mr Honeyburn.
Jones stared at the darkly scintillating blade for a few moments, conscious that Mr Honeyburn was watching him intently. Resolution and understanding seemed to rise within him from some place beneath, from deep below in the foundations of the earth.
‘It must be done,’ said Jones dully, and Mr Honeyburn nodded. Then Jones advanced towards Mr Honeyburn, raised the knife and, with a single, sweeping movement, brought the knife down and across the man’s throat. He saw momentary astonishment and then — was it? — understanding in his victim’s eyes as the blood sprang from his neck. Jones slashed again, and Mr Honeyburn fell to the floor like a garlanded ox on the altar of sacrifice.
Dark blood formed silent viscous pools on the boards as Jones contemplated the huge, mutilated body. He had known for some weeks now that it was Mr Honeyburn and not Jocelyn Slade to whom he was bound by the silver cord. And now the cord was loosed.
Jones took up the lamp from the table and dropped it onto the floor. It broke and the flames began to lick greedily at the spilt oil, which stretched like a finger across the wooden boards. Jones hurled his manuscript into the mounting blaze and ran from the room.
Out in the night it was raining hard, but Jones was glad of it because the downpour hid him like a cloak. Few people would be about, and the water would wash the deed away. He walked the empty city, barely knowing in which direction he went. Some hours went by before he found himself on the Embankment, where the swollen, rain-pierced flood reflected the row of riverside lamps in patches of dull gold. There, in the presence of nothing but his drowned conscience, Jones hurled the sacrificial knife into the sliding waters. At last he turned his feet with a will towards Soho.
It was grey dawn when he reached Handel Street, and the rain had ceased. For once the courtyard was bereft of dogs and drunken derelicts. There was about it a kind of peace, but it was the peace of desolation. He looked up to the window of his own set of rooms, not expecting to see anything, but for a kind of reassurance.
There was a figure in the window, and it was not that of his wife Mary or his little girl Sophie. A few seconds passed before he could understand its horrible familiarity. It was his own face and form, but so pale and haggard as to be almost insubstantial. The face, his own face, looked down at him, hollow-eyed with a look of loathing and fear. The next instant it was gone.
Jones raced up the stairs and into his apartment, but it was empty. The same silence of desolation that had been in the courtyard inhabited it, but this time it was not fearful. Jones stood still for a full minute, adjusting his mind; then he walked over to the table at the window, lit a candle, sat down, and took up his pen. Mary came in from the bedroom in her nightgown. She told him how she had been half demented worrying about where he was, but he ignored her. She begged him to come to bed, but he refused. She pleaded with him at the very least to take off his wet clothes. As a concession he removed his jacket then ordered her, perhaps more harshly than he had intended, to go back to bed. He heard a little sob just before she closed the bedroom door behind her, but it registered on his mind as a sound only. His head was in such a strange state that he could barely think; yet, as soon as a pen was in his hand and paper was beneath it, he found that he could write. Words seemed to pass through him and on to the page with barely a moment’s conscious intervention from his brain. It was as if he were a copyist merely, transcribing or translating from a moving picture in his mind. ‘So,’ he thought, in mild astonishment, as he put down the first words, ‘it is to be a play’.
LADY POLLY
A Solemn Mockery of Trivial People
by Lancelot Jones
ACT ONE
[SCENE: The Countess of Chevening’s drawing room in Mayfair. The butler, MEADOWS, shows in Lord DULVERTON, a fashionable man about town in his thirties.]
MEADOWS
Her Ladyship is not in, Lord Dulverton.
DULVERTON
That’s quite all right, Meadows. I’ll wait. Where is she, by
the way?
MEADOWS
I understand she is walking with her husband in the Park, my Lord.
DULVERTON
Really, Meadows, the way young women go about with their husbands quite openly nowadays is perfectly scandalous.
MEADOWS
It is hardly comme il faut, my Lord, and does little to promote the sanctity of marriage.
DULVERTON
Quite so. A marriage should be made in heaven and unmade in society. That is what civilisation means. I shall speak to the Archbishop on the subject: I understand that his views are sound.
MEADOWS
Like many of us, my lord, he is happily unmarried . . .
. . . and so on. It was quite extraordinary how easily it came. The following year Lancelot Jones’s play Lady Polly opened at the St James’s Theatre, with Mr George Alexander in the role of Lord Dulverton, and was the triumph of the London season.
Jones’s success quite eclipsed that of Jocelyn Slade, to whom he now hardly gave a thought. Writing came easily to him, as did his newly acquired wealth. One brilliant society comedy followed another, but when, in an idle moment, he tried to resurrect his former manner, he failed. No longer did he hear the tramp of legions on the hidden roads around Caerleon; no longer did clear waters flow down ancient hills, giving birth to secret music and immortal dreams.
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
[Ecclesiastes 12: 6–8]
The Road from Damascus
MARCUS WATERBURY does not like to talk about his Militant Socialist phase. Considering that he is now MP for Stanfield and Cheltern, and a rising star in the Conservative party, this is hardly surprising; but I have always felt that something other than normal political considerations guides his reticence. This was confirmed a couple of nights ago. I set it down now in case I forget it, and because I’m quite sure it won’t make it into his political memoirs, if he is ever foolish enough to write them.
Marcus and I are on a number of committees together, mostly to do with charitable arts foundations. I can’t say I was a big fan of his at first — too full of himself, I thought — but I saw at once that he had some useful committee skills. It is well-known rule of committee life that there is always a Committee Bore. He — almost always a he in my experience — is the type that goes on and on about spelling mistakes in the Minutes, or holds up proceedings endlessly by asking whether some tiny expenditure was entirely justified. It is usually not possible to get rid of him because the Bore is influential or rich, and mustn’t be offended in any way. Well, Marcus is very good at shutting up the Bore without seeming to be rude. It’s an art I admire, so that disposed me towards him. Then I found out that when you’re with him on your own, he’s very good at doing funny imitations of the other people on the committee. Being gently amusing, as opposed to witty, is not something politicians are normally good at, so I began to take an interest in him. That is how I discovered that he had once been an actor, hence the excellence of his imitations, and, even more surprisingly, a radical revolutionary Socialist, hence, presumably, the consummate technique for handling bores.
Marcus lives not very far away from us, and his wife Lady Celia has become great chums with Josephine, my better half. So anyway, last weekend we invited them over for a day’s shooting and to stay the night afterwards. I’m not mad on slaughtering birds myself, but our boys are, and I like the social side of it: what I, rather wittily I think, call the ‘après shoot.’ The lunch party with all the beaters and other also-rans tends be a bit unrefined, but you can make your dinner party at the end of the day more select, if you know what I mean. Like most men I don’t have an inexhaustible appetite for company and tend to suffer from ‘social fatigue’ (another of my rather apt little phrases), but intelligent conversation is another thing. The middle classes who live in Islington and Notting Hill Gate get masses of it, so I’m told. I envy them. If, like myself, you’re a peer of the realm who’s been pushed out of his part-time job in the Mother of Parliaments and sent to rusticate at the family pile in Dorset, you tend to get rather starved of intellectual stimulus. That is why I looked forward to a chat with Marcus.
After dinner on the Saturday the four of us — Marcus, Celia, Josephine and I — were all sitting in the Green Drawing room, toasting our toes at the fire and drinking port. The boys had buggered off to destroy civilisations on their computer, so we were free from their molestations.
My wife Josephine had just been reading this new book by Professor Hawkins called The Myth of Para-Psyche, and she was very excited about it, as she tends to be about the latest thing. Apparently the book proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that all so-called psychic phenomena — clairvoyance, ghosts, psychokinesis, the lot — are absolute bunk. According to Hawkins it’s an illusion, the product of our evolutionary make-up. Well, being a card-carrying member of the Church of England, I am naturally neutral on this issue, but Josephine was making it all sound most convincing. Josie told us how the chapter on ghosts is brilliant, and that this Hawkins man shows conclusively that ghosts are what he calls ‘psycho-social projections’ and therefore not real at all.
‘The one doesn’t follow from the other,’ said Marcus. ‘It is perfectly possible for something to be a projection of the human psyche and, at the same time, absolutely real.’
‘It depends what you call real,’ I said, which I think was a pretty sound contribution to the debate.
‘I would define it as that which is both true and possesses lasting value and significance.’
Well, that was good enough for me, but my wife was not happy. Once Josie gets bitten by a book she becomes fiercely loyal to it. She was not going to let Professor Hawkins sink beneath the waves on the say-so of a mere Conservative MP.
‘This is all very theoretical,’ she said, ‘but you must give me an example of what you mean by a ghost that is both a psychological projection and real.’
‘Well, I can, from experience,’ he said.
‘You mean, you’ve seen a ghost?’ This was tremendous news.
Marcus said: ‘I prefer not to call it a ghost: such a loaded term. I’d rather call it my Road From Damascus experience.’
* * * * *
When I came down from Oxford with a very mediocre degree, the usual things beckoned: merchant banks, the foreign office, the BBC, but none of them appealed. I was still not quite sure of who or what I was. I felt the need for what I then rather foolishly called ‘real life’, but as you rightly say, Robert, it depends what you mean by ‘real.’ I had done a good deal of theatre at university and was still mad on acting, so I thought I would become an actor, at least for a while. It would be an interesting profession and one which would allow me to see all sorts and conditions of men, so I took a postgraduate course at the Webber-Douglas, found an agent, and embarked on my career.
Some people have said rather paradoxically that one of my misfortunes in life has been that I have always been lucky. ‘He’s had to take the smooth with the smooth,’ was one phrase used of me, I believe. Well, I dispute that, and anyway I would contend that mostly we make our own good and bad luck, but it is certainly true that I had some good fortune when I was starting out as an actor. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I am now. I did some decent rep in the days when there still was rep, and, a couple of years into my career I found myself playing a number of nice small parts in a very prestigious production at the Round House of The Good Woman of Setzuan. The play is by Brecht, and, in case you didn’t know, it’s the one about the Chinese tart.
You probably never saw the production, but it was a big noise at the time because the lead was being played by Sonia Tombs, who had formed her own company to put it on. Well, Sonia was a star, as you know, and she still is, but in those days — I’m
talking about 1978 — she was not only already on the summit, but also a fantastically beautiful young woman: tall, raven haired, Valkyrie features, the lot.
I could write a book about Sonia. She was, and still is, an amazing actress and an amazing woman. Only one element in her make-up aroused suspicion in the theatrical world and perhaps held her back: her politics. It was, after all, the reason why she had decided to do the Brecht, and why she had formed her own company. Every management she had approached with the project had very politely turned her down.
As it happened, they were wrong. The show was a roaring success, but I don’t want to talk about that. Sonia was good to work with because she put her egalitarian principles into practice and treated each member of the company, from the highest to the lowest, as equals. Admittedly this didn’t go so far as giving everyone an equal share of the profits, but one must draw the line somewhere. She was fun to be with too. It has been said that Sonia has no sense of humour, and this is true, but she had a natural exuberance and gaiety which is a very fair substitute. At times, however, her political convictions used to kick in and led to some rather sticky moments. I remember one in particular which had consequences for me.
Between the matinée and evening show on the Saturday a group of company members, Sonia included, used to go to a nearby ‘greasy spoon’ café for tea and toast and fish and chips. It was one of the high points of the week for me, a moment of pure, unpretentious fun and comradeship. We were feeling exhilarated by a performance done and not too tired out to be looking forward to the last performance of the week, which was always a packed house. We felt we meant something; we felt alive. Conversation was usually trivial actor’s talk about tiny incidents during the show and theatrical gossip, but one Saturday, three weeks into the run, it was different.
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