“You mean he didn’t know Hans Frank at all?”
“He knew Frank but he didn’t work for him in Krakow. What happened was this: at the beginning of the war my father was working in the Volksgerichtshof, known as the VGH, which was the highest Nazi court for political crimes—it was part of Germany’s normal legal system in that those who appeared before it were arrested and prosecuted in the normal way, but the trouble was Germany moved from being a constitutional state, based on the rule of law, to being a police state where oppression was the only means of ruling. So the VGH quickly became corrupted. There was no right of appeal, no trial by jury and certainly no impartiality, as the judges were committed Nazis. And the people lucky enough to be acquitted weren’t set free—they were just turned over to the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps.
“My father didn’t approve of this procedure because he disliked the fact that the police authority wasn’t put under the control of the law, and he thought the Gestapo should be subject to the judiciary. Well, there was no changing the system but he did manage to change his job. He wrote to Frank to ask for a helping hand and Frank arranged for him to go to Poland to do courts martial; the system required a professional judge to preside with two soldiers. However, I rather doubt if my father enjoyed this either since his function was to be disciplinary rather than judicial and a high number of executions had to be ordered . . . No wonder he took to drink after the war! I think he was just ploughed under by all those disastrous events which wrecked his career and destroyed the law as he knew it. Yes, he was a Nazi, and yes, he should have been able to foresee the mayhem, but it’s easy for us to say that with the wisdom of hindsight, isn’t it, and my father certainly wasn’t alone in failing to foresee the horrors when he joined the Nazi party in 1929 in pursuit of his dream of a better Germany . . . It’s strange, but since I’ve wound up ploughed under myself I find I have a good deal more sympathy for him—or so I said to my psychiatrist during one of our interminable sessions centred on my past.”
“But if your father wasn’t a war criminal—”
“We still took the rat-run to Argentina—that was all true—but it wasn’t because he needed to evade the prosecutors at Nuremberg. We went because my father couldn’t bear to stay in a wrecked Germany and he had the money and the contacts required to escape.”
“But in that case, why did you float the story that he was a war criminal?”
“I needed a plausible reason to explain why I could be blackmailed, and a criminal father hyped up the credibility factor.” He reached for another sandwich. “You’re not eating, sweetheart!”
“I’ll get to it in a minute. So you invented the blackmail story about that Jew who had been with you on the ship to Argentina—”
“Yes, that was all a fiction. I’ve never been blackmailed about my Nazi origins.”
“But you were blackmailed about something else.”
“I was, but as I felt I couldn’t tell you the truth I had to come up with an alternative explanation.”
“And you felt you had to disclose the blackmail to explain your lack of capital?”
“I did feel the need to explain that, but in fact what drove me on to invent an alternative explanation was that I was afraid Sophie would tell you the truth. I discussed the situation with Elizabeth—with Mrs. Mayfield—”
“Wait a moment. When I first asked you about Mrs. Mayfield, you said she was just someone you didn’t see any more.”
“I was certainly estranged from her—we’d quarrelled over my decision to marry you. But after Sophie succeeded in meeting you face to face I felt I just had to have Mrs. Mayfield’s help in controlling the situation and I called her the next day.”
“I’m surprised Mrs. Mayfield chose to help you! Why not simply let Sophie bust up our relationship?”
“For various reasons she didn’t want the true story about the blackmail coming out. I’ll get to that later. Anyway—”
“—anyway, you and Mayfield cooked up a plot to defuse Sophie if she tried to spill the beans. But weren’t you afraid right from the start that the beans would be spilled?”
“Yes, but there was more than one type of bean, wasn’t there? When Sophie first heard I planned to remarry she said you ought to know that I’d been unfaithful to her from the beginning and had even destroyed her chance of having children. That was the disclosure I was fearing in the run-up to the wedding.”
I began to understand. “You mean in the beginning you thought Sophie wouldn’t spill the blackmail beans?”
“I knew she wouldn’t. She’d told me she hadn’t been able to bring herself to discuss the subject of the blackmail with anyone, even that local clergyman of hers. She’d found the subject quite literally unspeakable.”
“So in that case—”
“—I was more than worried that she might succeed in spilling the infidelity beans, but I thought I could survive that; I thought that if the worst came to the worst I’d be able to convince you she was just out of her mind with jealousy. I also thought she’d back off after the wedding because she’d always claimed her aim was to prevent the marriage taking place. However, to my horror I found she couldn’t let the matter rest after all.”
Even before he had finished speaking I was remembering Sophie’s conversation with me in the supermarket. “She felt more strongly than ever, didn’t she,” I said, “that God wanted her to make a new effort to dish up the truth—and this time she was going to speak the unspeakable.”
All he said in reply was: “When she told you to ask me about Mrs. Mayfield, I knew the writing was on the wall.”
“And that was when you got together again with Mayfield. Was it she who came up with the next plan?”
“Yes, she thought it would be a better tactical move if I didn’t wait for Sophie to spill the blackmail beans but went ahead and pre-empted the true story with the fiction. She thought you’d be more likely to swallow the fiction if it appeared to be dragged out of me in the form of a confession, so she got Mandy Simmons to stage that phone call—”
“—and then afterwards you and Mayfield slogged away at the task of convincing me Sophie was certifiable.”
“Well, we had to destroy her credibility!”
“Sure.” I ran my tongue around my lips as if to soften them up for pronouncing the crucial sentence. “So why exactly,” I said, “were you being blackmailed?”
Finishing his glass of champagne he stood up and began to roam around the room. He could no longer look at me.
At last he said: “It was a sex-mess.” Halting by the window at the far end of the room he stood staring out over the tranquil garden. “Before I go any further,” I heard him say, “I want to make it clear that I’ve been very happy with you, and I don’t want to live now as I lived in the past.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I appreciate the compliment. But just how the hell did you live in the past?”
He returned to the ice-bucket on the coffee-table and poured himself another dose of champagne.
IX
To help him along I said in my calmest voice: “Of course I’d realised Mrs. Mayfield’s groups mainline on sex.”
But he seemed untroubled by this statement. “The groups’ activities are well within the law,” he said. “But the big advantage of them is that Mrs. Mayfield makes sure they’re secure. There’s never any trouble with blackmailers.”
“How often did you—”
“I never went back to the group after I met you.”
“But that night—the night when you said you went to say goodbye—”
“I didn’t go. The story that Mandy and Steve were trying to get me back into the group wasn’t true. I just floated it to make it more plausible that Mandy should phone me. It would have looked odd if she’d called out of the blue.”
“Then what were you doing on the night you were supposed to be saying goodbye to the group?”
“I was with Mrs. Mayfield. I thought it would be politic to
take her out to dinner at a nice restaurant—and no, I didn’t take drugs that night! If I seemed woolly when I got back it was only because I’d had a lot to drink and I was dead tired.”
I made no comment but pushed the conversation forward by asking: “How often did you see the group when you were married to Sophie?”
“Hardly at all—you’ve misunderstood what was going on. I’ve only been involved with a Mayfield group twice, and on both occasions my involvement lasted no more than a year. Mrs. Mayfield prescribed the groups as therapy, not as long-term recreation.”
“How did you actually meet this woman?” I was trying to keep my tone neutral, as if I were a lawyer questioning a client about some ethically dubious facts. I reckoned this approach would be the most likely to produce good results. Now was not the time to sink into my customary verbal abuse of Mrs. Mayfield.
“I met her just as I originally told you,” he said. “I happened to see her card in that Soho bookshop. But as I admitted at the Rectory, this meeting took place much earlier than I’d previously disclosed and she was living in Lambeth then, not Fulham. When we met I was only four years into my marriage, but Sophie had found out about the sterility, and by that time my guilt was so great that I was unable to perform either with her or with anyone else. Well, I didn’t mind not sleeping with Sophie, but I certainly minded not being able to make it with other women—”
“I bet.” I found myself unable to stop the neutral mask slipping.
“You’re thinking I’m callous, aren’t you, but don’t jump to conclusions! I was very fond of Sophie. However, we never hit it off in bed so after the VD disaster she was more than happy to switch off her sex life—and who can blame her for that? I certainly didn’t. And I didn’t want to leave her. She was still exactly the kind of wife I needed at that time, and anyway . . . I felt justified in living with her.” He paused as if reconsidering this sentence and realising, as I did, that it was off-key.
I nailed the neutral mask back in place. “Justified?” I repeated, careful to sound non-threatening, but he seemed to have trouble working out how to explain himself. At last he said: “She gave me the well-run, beautiful home I should have had—the home I did have before my parents emigrated and went to pieces. Sophie had such taste and class and style.” He hesitated again but added abruptly: “A woman like that was owing to me after all I’d been through with my mother.”
“Could Mrs. Mayfield understand that?”
“Of course. But don’t forget that when I first consulted Mrs. Mayfield, the topic under discussion wasn’t how I could renew my sexual relationship with Sophie but how I could get going with other women again. It wasn’t until years later, when my marriage finally broke down as the result of the blackmail, that Elizabeth—Mrs. Mayfield—advised me to marry again in order to get my personal life into a safer groove. Until that time she’d quite understood that Sophie had to stay in my life.”
“Did Mrs. Mayfield have a wife in mind for you?”
“Yes, that was the second time she directed me to a group for therapy. The woman was already a member.”
“God, not Mandy!”
“No, she was already married to Steve.”
“And did you decide straight away that the bride-to-be was unsuitable?”
“I knew she’d be unsuitable even before I saw her,” he said drily. “I certainly wasn’t going to get permanently involved with any woman hooked on group sex. However, because Mrs. Mayfield had helped me at the time of the blackmail I felt I couldn’t dismiss her suggestions about marriage out of hand. I played along with her plan for a while—until I met you and drew the line.”
I heard myself say very casually, as if attending to a barely relevant thought which had just chanced to drift into my mind: “I suppose Mrs. Mayfield never fancied marrying you herself? After all, you’re much the same age as she is, aren’t you, and if you met her when you were a lot younger—”
He raised an eyebrow to convey sardonic amusement. “Mrs. Mayfield has long since figured out that the last encumbrance she needs is a husband!”
“But how did you feel? If she were to ditch that grey wig, which I suppose she thought gave her a passing resemblance to your description of a frumpish Sophie, and if she were to tog herself up in black satin with plenty of cleavage—”
“Well, of course I screwed her,” he said. “That was all part of the treatment when I first sought a cure for impotence. But marriage? Good God, no! Can you seriously imagine me marrying anyone who has that kind of suburban accent?”
“Lucky I learned to talk acceptable English then, wasn’t it?” I said, automatically attempting to conceal my horror with humour, but I was hardly aware of what I was saying. On some level of my mind I believe I had faced the possibility that he had slept with Mrs. Mayfield. But I had never faced the possibility that he might consider her worst flaw was her accent.
Meanwhile he was saying casually: “One can’t pretend accents don’t matter. Well, as I was saying—”
“You screwed Mrs. Mayfield.”
He suddenly became aware of my true reaction, the reaction which implied criticism. Moving away from me again he wandered over to the silver fruit-baskets and checked one as if he were looking for tarnish. “After my impotence had been overcome,” he said levelly, “Mrs. Mayfield sent me to a group—that was the first time I went. She said it offered a way in which I could get my full confidence back by using a variety of women.” He put down the fruit-basket. “I didn’t sleep with her again,” I heard him say. “We both had other fish to fry, and besides . . . it was a question of power. Mrs. Mayfield would never have wanted to give me that much control on a continuing basis.”
I found this plausible but still had to ask: “What about the night before the stabbing when you bedded down at her Fulham house?”
“By then I was quite definitely not Mrs. Mayfield’s flavour-of-the-month. Nothing happened.”
There was a silence.
“Well, as I was saying”—he had clearly decided to skate away fast from this awkward topic—“the first time I sampled the group was when I was recovering from impotence, but after a while I got bored and wanted to drop out. I thought Mrs. Mayfield might be annoyed, but she explained that this kind of group therapy usually had a limited timespan and all that mattered was that I was now fully cured. She then said”—he paused to gulp down some champagne—“she then said she had a much more interesting group for me to sample, a group which would engage me mentally and spiritually as well as physically, and would I be interested in giving it a try. So I said: ‘Fine—tell me more about it,’ and the first thing she said was: ‘Well, it’s not really a group. It’s a society.’ ”
I drained my glass and at once reached for the bottle in the ice-bucket. “A secret society?”
“Very secret. Sweetheart, I hate to admit I lied to you about this, but—”
“You were up to your neck in the occult,” I said, and at last began to believe I had never really known him at all.
X
“The word ‘occult’ has unfortunately acquired a very pejorative meaning,” said Kim fluently. “Naturally you’re going to be alarmed in case I’ve been involved with a bunch of socially inadequate weirdos who believe fairies live at the bottom of every garden, but surely you can accept that a man of my intelligence isn’t going to dabble with anything which doesn’t chime in some way with reality? Mrs. Mayfield recommended the society to me because she knew how interested I was in harnessing and mastering the Powers. Well, how close to reality can one get? The Powers had smashed up my early life and haunted me ever since! Of course I longed to know how I could control them.”
He paused as if expecting me to argue with him but I could only wait numbly for him to continue.
“The occult,” he resumed smoothly at last, “is a word referring to a system of hidden truths, known to a few. The more you know, the better placed you are to control and manipulate reality for your own benefit because the system pr
ovides a spiritual empowerment by means of an expansion of consciousness. The Powers are essentially Spirit but exist as archetypes in the unconscious mind, so if you expand your consciousness you can encompass them, subjugate them and use them for your own purposes . . . In other words, what I’m really talking about is a modern version of the old Gnostic heresy which the Christians have spent so much energy trying to liquidate in the past. No wonder Mrs. Mayfield always sees Christians as the enemy!”
“No wonder. Are we talking witchcraft here?”
“Certainly not! Strict occult practice is quite different from either respectable Wicca rituals or the witchcraft fantasies peddled by the ignorant media. Genuine Wicca practitioners are concerned with nature and the environment—with natural forces. We’re interested in the cosmic, in the different levels of reality which exist beyond this world altogether. Wicca practitioners are basically uninterested in Christianity, whereas the Gnostics . . . well, Gnosticism and Christianity are like two brothers who shared a nursery but fell out in adolescence and have been enemies all their adult life. They both had a common bond in mysticism, and in the early centuries there were actually Christian Gnostics and Gnostic Gospels, so you can see what a confused philosophical melting-pot it was, but after Christianity got hyped up on dogma—”
“Forget all that. Just get back to brass tacks. What did this occult society of yours actually do?”
“The first point to grasp is that this isn’t a spiritually undeveloped group focused primarily on hedonism. This is a serious society using sex as a mere tool to open up the mind to spiritual enlightenment.”
I somehow managed to stop myself saying: “Oh yeah?” but it was becoming increasingly hard to maintain anything resembling a neutral professional manner.
“There are different kinds of Gnostics,” said Kim, “and many forms of Gnosticism. Some Gnostics starve and deprive the body in order to open up the mind but some Gnostics choose to indulge in every sensual experience available. But in the end the body’s of no importance. So long as you have the right spiritual knowledge—the right ‘gnosis’—you’re on course for salvation.”
The High Flyer Page 44
