The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  ‘Because you’re an artist; you’re serious about writing,’ he said. The basis for this was that I had once told him that I was trying to write a novel. ‘You’ll understand. The others would either leer or disapprove.’ Of course I was flattered and this stifled my anxieties.

  Alex had spent the intervening few days burning the recordings onto a disc for us to watch. For about an hour or so, we watched Carol getting up and going to bed and having long conversations with someone called ‘Tishy’ or ‘Tish’. It did not take me long to forget that I was invading a private world because it was not long before I felt myself part of it. Carol’s universe did not appear to be a very exciting one, but its very banality had a certain charm. There was the clumsy, uncoordinated little dance that she sometimes did in her underwear when she played a favourite CD. There was the wrapt absorption with which she examined her slender naked body in the mirror, wondering perhaps how desirable she was, little knowing that her vulnerability made her very desirable. There was the pert way in which she stuck her bottom out before farting and then flapped the smell away with a little wave of the hand. I suppose in someone older or less pretty all these things would have seemed grotesque, even pathetic.

  She appeared to be a good girl, if not perhaps aggressively intelligent. She went home to her parents in Gloucestershire every weekend; her gossip on the phone to Tishy was giggling and unmalicious; if she brought men back to the flat they did not enter her bedroom in which she slept every night of the working week. I began to fantasise about meeting her, taking her out and, armed with my secret knowledge, seducing her. In the middle of this reverie Alex stopped the DVD player. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That sort of thing goes on for several weeks and then there’s a change. This is where it gets really weird.’ He began to scan through the DVD while I contemplated going home. I did not want there to be a change. I wanted her to continue in the same sweet innocent ways, and I dreaded the prospect of something sleazier.

  It began with her return one evening, drunk or stoned, and collapsing onto the bed in convulsive sobs. That night she did not undress to sleep. After that her life seemed to become more frantic: the room became messier, she was frequently drunk, she got up and went to bed at odd times. The talks with Tishy seemed the same as ever, but there were other calls more subdued and intense in which painful relationships were discussed and explored.

  There was someone in particular called Kel whom she rang up from time to time. This Kel—one could not tell if it was male or female—seemed to act as a confidant. To Kel she would retail, with some reluctance at first, her secret feelings and fantasies. She was so ashamed of them and yet they were like the thoughts that come to all of us. She occasionally felt resentful of people she loved and who loved her. She was irritated by her parents when she ought to have been grateful. She had sexual fantasies of a mildly masochistic kind. She spoke to Kel with greater frequency and each time she did she was made to repeat the accounts of her fantasies, and, as she did so, the fantasies became gradually more extreme.

  Then she began bringing men into her bedroom. They were joyless sexual encounters with men indiscriminately chosen. Sometimes there was brutality and she would cry out in pain, but she offered no resistance. I wanted to shout out and tell her to stop; either that or stop watching, but I could do neither. I looked over at Alex and he was transfixed. The phone calls to Kel continued. She told him about the men, always ending a graphic account with the pathetic words: ‘I think I’m beginning to learn.’

  Then these one-night stands stopped abruptly. For a week or so a semblance of normality was restored. Alex said: ‘This is where I stopped watching.’ It was now three in the morning, but we were still wide awake. Alex turned the DVD player off and went to make some coffee.

  ‘We ought to know what happened to her,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘I sort of feel I shouldn’t go on, but you’re right. We have to see it through to the end now.’

  Was I right? I wasn’t sure. We drank coffee in silence then Alex turned the DVD player on again. She was still seeing no men, but the phone calls were changing. She was talking less and listening more. Sometimes the phone would ring and you knew it was Kel just from the solemn way she would reply:

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .’

  Then one evening the bedroom door opened and Carol walked in, turned and said: ‘Come in, Kel.’ A man entered. He was well built, of medium height, and in his fifties, perhaps older. He was bald except for a light frizz of white hair around his cranium. The features were strong, a short straight nose, a firm chin and a small thin-lipped mouth. He had an aura of purpose and power, and he had obviously kept himself in shape. There was something undeniably magnetic about him, but also repulsive. Wherever he looked he looked with unblinking intensity.

  Alex almost shouted: ‘Christ, she’s not going to bed with him!’

  ‘Some girls like older men.’

  ‘But my God, him!’

  ‘Perhaps she’s not going to bed with him,’ I said, not believing but hoping. ‘He could be just a sort of father figure, or something.’

  Carol did not seem to be afraid of Kel so much as utterly submissive. He told her to take off her clothes, which she did mechanically, without any eagerness, keeping her eyes on him. He, meanwhile, was looking at her raptly with that intense, impersonal stare of his.

  When she had finished she stood ankle-deep in discarded clothes. Kel stepped onto them and reached out with his left hand to touch one of her breasts. Just before he touched them, his shoulders suddenly raised themselves and he became rigidly still. For a few moments he remained like this while Carol continued to gaze at him, bewildered.

  Suddenly he turned his head to stare directly at the camera. Alex and I both jumped. He might have been in the room, the look was so immediate and intense. It seemed to leap at us across the barriers of technology and time. His extraordinary pale blue eyes were filled with concentrated loathing. Like everything about him, there was something purposeful in his look. It was not rage, or hatred merely for the sake of rage, it was the performance of some indefinable act.

  ‘My God, he’s seen us!’ said Alex involuntarily.

  ‘Turn it off,’ I said.

  ‘No! No! This is ridiculous. He can’t do anything. We must see what happens.’

  The man was still staring directly into the lens, but now he was mouthing something. We listened intently but could hear no words. Then the screen snowed over. Wild colours flashed across it so vivid that they hurt our eyes: acid greens, electric blues, fire reds. Then the screen cleared and we were in the bedroom again. It was a clear picture except that from time to time the whole image quivered in a strange way, as if the camera were looking upwards through the troubled surface of a pool of water.

  There was a figure in the bed, but no-one that either of us at first recognised. It was a man, pale and horribly thin. He had lost most of his hair, but what was left of it was black and clammy. Two days of black stubble covered his sunken cheeks. His pale bony hands fumbled convulsively at the duvet. His breath came in short moaning gasps. It looked as if he was in the last stages of some hideous wasting disease.

  ‘My God!’ said Alex. ‘What the hell is that bloke doing in my bed?’

  I could not speak. It is the only time in my life that I have ever been paralysed by fear, but of what? An image on a screen?

  One of the hands lifted itself from the duvet and started to make clawing movements as if trying to ward something off in the vicinity of the camera’s eye. The man started to moan words which I could not understand. He repeated the same syllables again and again. It sounded like: ‘Hurninaw, hurninaw, hurninaw.’ Then the face which had been in gaunt profile turned itself towards the camera, and I received the last terrible shock of the evening. I recognised the eyes. They were large and brown, and the lashes, though gummed and slimed with disease, were long.

  ‘Christ, who the hell is he?’ Alex muttered.

  ‘Don’t you recogni
se him?’ I asked.

  ‘No! Do you?’

  ‘No.’ But I lied.

  **

  I can’t remember now how or when I left Alex’s flat. I know I did not sleep that night and the next day, which was a Saturday, is a complete blank in my memory. On Sunday I lunched with my parents and got some sleep in the afternoon. When I went back to work on Monday I did see Alex. He avoided my glance, but otherwise seemed perfectly normal. In the following weeks our contact was minimal. We both stuck to an unspoken agreement that the evening when we watched the recordings was not to be mentioned.

  As it happened, my days at DH Associates were numbered. The firm decided to go in for downsizing, or streamlining, or whatever they call sacking people, and I was out. I was not all that sorry to leave and it seemed that nobody was particularly sorry to see me do so. Alex, in particular, made no effort to commiserate.

  I spent two months in the limbo of the workless. It was a dark period in which I began to believe I would never work again. At last, through a good friend, I landed a brilliant job at a new up-and-coming PR firm called Murray-Thomson. Alex and DH Associates soon became very distant memories. Then, one evening, about a year later, I happened to find myself in Freek’s wine bar where I had met Alex for a drink that night. I had been meeting a client and, after he had gone, I lingered, idly finishing the bottle of Chilean Chardonnay we had ordered between us. I was in a contented unreflective mood when suddenly I heard my name called. It was Sally, one of the art directors at DH Associates. Though we had never been particularly friendly at DH she greeted me effusively and accepted my offer of a drink.

  ‘We hear you’re doing great things at Murray-Thomson,’ she said. I smiled. So that was it. Success had conferred status on me. ‘A lot of us were very sorry to see you go. One of our best copywriters. The Management at DH is just so crass. Do you know if Murray-Thomson is looking around for new young blood?’

  I made a noncommittal answer and asked after my old associates. Sally said:

  ‘You heard about Alex, I suppose.’

  ‘No. What about him?’

  ‘Oh, God! He’s dead. Didn’t you know? I thought you and Alex were great mates.’

  ‘No. Not specially. Not at all really.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. No. Sorry. I mean it’s just that none of us really liked Alex.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was incredibly quick. He got this terrible disease. Lost weight; lost his hair. The doctors were baffled. Some sort of virus. AIDS maybe.’

  ‘But Alex wasn’t gay.’

  ‘You don’t have to be gay to get AIDS, you know.’

  ‘Sorry. No. Quite. Go on.’

  ‘Well, they tried everything, but he just kept going down hill. Eventually he discharged himself from hospital because the doctors were getting nowhere. I did go and visit him. The last time I saw him at his flat it was awful. He was delirious. He was in bed and he kept staring at this spot on the bedroom wall and waving something away with his hand. And he kept screaming the same thing. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. It was: “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!” ’

  MISS MARCHANT'S CAUSE

  I can’t understand how I came to do ‘The Dare’, as it was called. Though not exactly shy, I was a timid, cautious boy at school, with no great ambitions other than to get by and not be punished. My memory of events leading up to the incident is hazy, but I am sure it had a lot to do with what is now called ‘peer pressure’. I was twelve years old and in my last year at Stone Court preparatory school in Thanet.

  Just outside the school premises, and strictly out of bounds, was a large, derelict, red brick building standing in a wilderness, surrounded by a high wall. This was in the early 1960s, before the age of the developer, when such ruins were not so unusual. The building, called Grove House, exerted a powerful influence on our young imaginations. Of course, it was said to be haunted, but how and by what was never specified. Masters when interrogated on the subject of Grove House were invariably vague, but whether through ignorance or a reluctance to impart information I could never tell.

  The whole school used to take a walk every Sunday afternoon and frequently passed its rusty, padlocked front gates. Through these one glimpsed what had once been a park with fir trees and rhododendrons, lawns and herbaceous borders, now thoroughly wild and weed-ridden. Beyond this was the house, vast and rambling, the colour of dried blood. It was on three floors, and along its front ran a glass-roofed verandah, smashed and crazed by years of vandalism and neglect. The style was plain mid-Victorian institutional with touches of Gothic and, as I now know, it had been built in 1870.

  The Dare was to enter the grounds, get into the building and return with some memento of the expedition. One Sunday Summer evening a friend called Farr and I decided to do it. I remember that we climbed over a broken section of the wall and entered the grounds with no great misgivings. The evening was pleasantly warm from the sun which had shone all day and the overgrown park was mysterious without being threatening. However, the Dare was to enter the house. The front door was locked, but we knew from previous darers that we could get in through a window on the verandah. This we did and entered a large white room empty except for a single wicker chair. The evening sun shot great dust-filled bolts of light across the room. Farr suggested we take the chair back as a souvenir and I laughed, as much to reassure myself with the sound of my voice as for any other reason. We tried the only door in the room and it opened. It was darker beyond, but I said we must go on. We still had to find our souvenir, and I felt that our dare was not complete until we had entered the bowels of the building.

  We went through the door into a long gloomy corridor into which some light filtered from a window at one end. The floor of black and maroon encaustic tiles was littered with debris, so that every step we took crackled like a fusillade. The feeling that we should get out of here as soon as possible became very insistent. I stooped to pick up a little loose square of tile for my souvenir, and, as I did so, something happened which for a few brief seconds gave me an odd feeling of reassurance. I became aware of a smell with which I was intensely familiar, the smell of my own school, Stone Court, on the mornings when it was being cleaned: carbolic, soapy water, wax polish on wood. Then it occurred to me that this was not a natural smell to find in a derelict building. I turned round to look at my friend Farr.

  In the gloom I could see that his round, freckled face was whiter than usual and he was looking at something over my shoulder with a blank expression. It was as if his face was losing the thing that made him Farr and no-one else. I turned back and looked towards the window at the end of the corridor.

  There, etched against the light was the figure of a woman in a long dress. She was facing towards us, tall, with a slender, and, as I now think, a voluptuous figure. I could distinguish no features, only a black unmoving silhouette. It was enough. We were off at a run, howling as we went.

  After that I only remember that we got back into our own school grounds without further adventure, that we did not boast about our escapade and that I kept the little square of dark red encaustic tile from Grove House.

  Very soon the Grove House adventure faded in my memory until I almost began to doubt its reality. The tile was kept at the back of a drawer. Each time I came across it I thought of throwing it away, but I didn’t. It was not that I wanted to remember the incident, but something told me I should not forget.

  Then, when I was eighteen, I happened to find myself at Paddington Station about to board a train to Oxford with nothing to read. The selection of paperbacks at W.H. Smith’s was limited, but I chose what seemed to me the most interesting, a compilation volume called Victorian Scandals.

  I was on the train before I was able to examine the book. I turned first to the thin, smudged spread of photographs sandwiched between the pages of print. There were pictures of Oscar Wilde and Bosie, of Florence Bravo and Dr Gully, of Tranby Croft and Sir William Gordon Cumming. Wit
h all of these and the scandals attached to them I was more or less familiar. Then I turned a page and received a shock. It surprises me now to think that a dingy photograph of a drab Victorian building could make my heart beat faster and turn me hot and then cold. I looked round at my fellow passengers to see if they had noticed anything abnormal about me, but they were absorbed in their own affairs. The photograph was of Grove House, and the caption read:

  Grove House, the private asylum run by Eleanor Marchant, where over thirty patients died, in mysterious circumstances.

  On the same page was a half-length photograph in an oval of a woman dressed plainly in the costume of the 1880s. Under it the caption read:

  Eleanor Marchant, pioneer in the treatment of the insane, who murdered her own patients. Was she mad herself?

  The face in the photograph had that strange, stony inscrutability you often see in Victorian photographs, the product in part of the early camera’s long exposure times. The features were severe but handsome, the only unattractive element being a wide thin-lipped mouth. Beneath the stiff bodice one detected a voluptuous figure. My eighteen year old mind scented a powerfully sexual being behind the façade; it returned with a jolting vividness to the silhouette in the corridor. I was enthralled.

  The piece on The Grove House Mystery, as it was called, was not well written. Victorian Scandals was the work of a hack who specialised in the genre of ‘true life crimes’. One was aware of a straining after sensation which, paradoxically, seemed rather to rob the story of its strangeness. Nevertheless, the bare bones were interesting enough.

  Eleanor Marchant had been the daughter of well-off parents. From an early age she exhibited a zealous, crusading nature, a genuine desire to ‘do good’, combined, as it sometimes is, with an exhibitionist streak. Her inspiration was Florence Nightingale, but the sphere in which she proposed to shine was the treatment of the insane. The writer implied that Eleanor’s choice of this field may have been prompted by the fact that there was a record of insanity in her family; though it is just as likely to have been simply that a more humane treatment of mental illness was beginning to be a fashionable cause by the middle of the nineteenth century.