A B C D E F G
H I J K L M N
O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z
Now she had a key to convert any letter of the alphabet into a musical note. M was F, O was A, and so on.
She lifted the trumpet to her lips and played her name: FABDA. It came out a mysterious and moving phrase, with an unresolved A at the end. She tried it backwards: ADBAF. It was a variation on the mystery, still unresolved and leaving the soul expectant. Then the original version again; this time the A at the end had a different effect, as though it might be a harmony from a music of a future time, or from another planet. She played the three phrases over and over until they were as much a part of her consciousness as the color blue, or her own name. After that she finished every practice session with them, even at school where she mystified her fellow students and old Mr. Paumunker, who believed she was slightly deranged. When she was questioned, she said only, “Fabda Adbaf Fabda.” Mr.Paumunker tried it on the piano and found she was right. He shook his head.
Moira went on growing through her school years and ended as tall as a man, with the statuesque poise she retained from walking with a book on her head. Shortly after she left school, at the age of nineteen, she was married for the first time to a young man she met at a ball. Humphrey Lowell, called Humper by his friends, was handsome, elegant, and witty, and she stole him away from a half-dozen other girls who coveted him. This marriage lasted for five years and then Humper threw her over for a hussy. She hired a photographer to take pictures of the pair in flagrante delicto in a hotel room, and then divorced him in a spectacular trial.
Moira married the first time for love and the second time for money. Her second husband was Jack Pockock, called Jock by his friends. He came from an old Long Island family who had lived in the same house for four generations. The family’s money came from the manufacture, in the time of Jock’s great-grandfather, of some small domestic object that no one was willing to discuss. The clan came to an end with Jock and Moira, who had no children. Jock raised horses on the property in Oyster Bay. There was a small lake with swans and ducks, an eighteenth century house, and a household staff of five. In addition to horses, Jock’s interests were dog-racing, automobiles, French brandy, and making money. In those days before the War automobiles were still a curiosity, expensive and requiring expert knowledge to operate. Jock had three of them and spent a good deal of time tinkering with them in the carriage house of the estate, assisted by the gardener-cum-chauffeur. He also owned a skyscraper in Manhattan, farms in Georgia, a dog-racing track in Connecticut, a whole island with a town on it in Maine, and a lot of stock in Wall Street.
Jock was red-faced, red-nosed, and red behind the ears, with small eyes and a hairline square over his forehead. Usually he held in his teeth a cigar that always seemed to be half smoked. The lovemaking of Jock and Moira was a farce. Jock would get so excited that he would come to a climax before he was even inside her body. Once he did this when she was still in the bathroom preparing herself. After that she told him wearily, “Just think of me, Jock.”
She still had her secret visions and amused herself with them from time to time. She had nothing to do with herself and she had an active mind. In school she had heard about the Women’s Movement, and after she was married to Jock she became interested in Suffragism; she joined a Suffragist group and often went on the train to their meetings in New York. At this time, the aims of the movement were to secure the vote for women and to prohibit the use of alcohol; the Suffragettes were also interested in the child labor question, problems of world peace, and the right of women to conduct their own financial affairs.
It was at this time that Moira adopted the costume she was to wear for the rest of her life: a long white linen gown, a round linen hat, white stockings, and white shoes with low heels. When she went out, she carried a white linen bag with a clasp at the top that snapped like the jaws of a small animal when she shut it. Jock disliked these clothes and they had many quarrels about them. Once after he had been drinking French brandy he attempted to take them off her forcibly and only succeeded in damaging the gown beyond repair. She was saved from this assault only by Jock’s sexual difficulties; at a certain point he broke off abruptly and had to go to his room to change his own clothing. On another occasion he opened the Sunday rotogravure to find a photograph of her marching in a parade on Fifth Avenue, and he grew so angry that he threw a table lamp at her.
She told him, “Jock, I don’t like that.”
This enraged him even more. “Get back on your perch!” he shouted.
“My perch?”
“Back in the parrot cage. You like it there. You know you like it there. I’ll tell you what you like.”
The oil lamp, which missed her narrowly, set fire to the carpet and the maid had to come and put it out. Moira left the burned place there as a silent reproach, and Jock bought a massive Moroccan pouf and set it on the carpet to cover the spot. On this piece of furniture, a kind of round ottoman in decorated leather, they sometimes sat in the evening, she on one side and he on the other; she read the works of Madame Blavatsky and he drank brandy and smoked his cigar.
Moira remembered her old trumpet, which she had not played since her school days. It was dusty and tarnished, but she polished it up and cleaned the mouthpiece with a damp cloth. Lacking music, she played over and over the three phrases from her girlhood, her name with variations.
FABDA
ADBAF
FABDA
This gave her a deep pleasure, and after a while she took to playing it every evening, not in her bedroom as she had as a girl, but in the parlor on the other side of the Moroccan pouf from Jock. It seemed to have no effect on him, although he stared at her in a puzzled way now and then. Perhaps it made him drink a little more, or regress further into the swirls of cigar smoke that curled around his head. She also found other ways to addle his brains. She mastered the trick of sleeping with her eyes open, and would lie all night staring at the ceiling, or seeming to, while her mind and her soul were elsewhere. When Jock came into the room to see about the possibility of getting in bed with her, as he still did from time to time, he would take fright as though he were looking at a corpse lying on the bed. In her own mind she couldn’t be sure whether she was sleeping or waking. She saw Jock’s form approaching the bed, but it was as though she was having a dream, or viewing him by telepathy from another planet. She also took to sleeping in her Suffragette costume including the hat. This was a further barrier to Jock’s unwanted attentions.
In Jock’s favor it should be said that he was not well during this time, and his health deteriorated even more as the years went by. He had some disease that the doctors had an elaborate name for, involving the circulation of blood to the brain, for which he took small violet pills no larger than the head of a pin several times a day. If he didn’t take them his thoughts became muddled, he was stupefied, he blinked, and he couldn’t remember what he ought to do. He also had a hernia, which ought to have been repaired surgically, but he had an irrational dread of anesthesia, fearing that if he ever lost his tenuous grip on consciousness he might never recover it. He feared sleep, and slept only fitfully, with frequent awakenings to turn on the light and look at the alarm clock, with the result that he was irritable much of the time. His hernia caused him to lay his hand frequently on his groin with a sharp grimace of pain. He did this first in private, then, out of habit, in public too. The one thing that seemed to help with the pain was brandy. He drank more of it as the hernia got worse.
Moira spent more and more time with her Suffragette sisters in New York. Once she even stayed overnight and took a hotel room in the city. When she came back the next day she found him looking out through the plate glass of the front door, frowning irritably. She came in and set her things down on the pouf.
He paced back and forth. “What d’you do down there all the time anyhow? What are those hens up to?”
“We want the Vote.”
&nb
sp; “And when you get it you’ll take away our booze. I know what you’re up to.” He looked at his glass as though he were considering throwing it at her, but took a long drink from it instead. “The Vote! What’s Bimetallism? Can you tell me that? Eh?”
“You’re right,” she said. “We want to take away your booze.”
He had nothing more to say to that and hardly spoke to her for several days. When they met in the house they passed like two strange ships, without exchanging signals. It was possible, she thought, that he was meditating some act of retribution toward her, or dreaming how he might do this. She was confident of her ability to dodge his thrown lamps, if he kept on drinking. He did at least buy a truss, and this relieved him of having to lay his hand on his groin. He kept his violet pills in various places in the house, because he was afraid of not being able to find them when he needed them. There were some in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, some in the kitchen cupboard, some in the sideboard where he kept his supply of French brandy, and some stuck under the cushions of the sofa in the living room. He also kept a few in his pockets, but he usually forgot to take them out when he sent his suits to the cleaner.
Moira felt under the sofa cushion for the pills and transferred them to the cushions of the Moroccan pouf. She would not dream of throwing them away. That would be malicious, even criminal. She simply put them in another place. The pills in the medicine cabinet she put in the nightstand by Jock’s bed, and the pills in the kitchen she put in another cupboard. The pills in the sideboard she put into an empty sugar bowl, and the ones in the pockets of his clothing she put into different pockets. Jock at this time was out in the carriage house, adjusting the carburetor of his Locomobile.
That evening after dinner Jock drank brandy sitting on the pouf for a while, then he got up and disappeared. Moira heard him moving through the other rooms of the house, opening and shutting a door, bumping against a wall in the hall, climbing onto a stool in the kitchen. Occasionally, looking up from her book, she would see him passing by an open doorway, or entering the living room only to change his mind and disappear through the door again. She watched for a long time as he wandered around the house, thinking where he could have left his pills, and then trying to remember what he was looking for, and becoming more and more perplexed and turned inward on his own inscrutable thoughts. He wouldn’t ask her because he was too proud and because he didn’t trust her. From her position in an armchair in the library, she watched him kneeling on the floor in the living room, wrapped in thought, perhaps because he had intended to look under the sofa for the pills and then forgot. She turned back to her book, which was Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. A half an hour later when she went into the living room she found he had become so stupid that he had finally stopped breathing. When she touched him he was cold and his face was the color of old newspaper.
Moira called the maid, exactly as she would when he tipped over his glass of brandy, or when he set the carpet on fire with the lamp. She efficiently managed the proceedings that followed, with the help of excellent lawyers. After the funeral she liquidated Jock’s investments, sold the house and the furniture, and put the proceeds into government bonds. She spent the next several years living in hotels in various parts of the world: Manhattan, Miami, Santa Barbara, London, Konstanz, and Baden-Baden.
After Jock’s death, she became more and more interested in the world of spiritualism, clairvoyance, Astral Bodies, animal magnetism, and thought transference. She read more Madame Blavatsky, including the two volumes of The Secret Doctrine. Under the influence of these writings, and of her own thoughts, she felt her inner nature changing. It was on the shore of the Bodensee in Germany that she had one of the crucial experiences of her life, one that led her into the world of the occult that had previously been only an intimation in her mind. In consequence of a light indisposition, a doctor had restricted her for several days to a liquid diet, and the fasting had left her feeling light-headed and slightly unreal. Standing alone in a park in Konstanz, she gazed out over the lake partly covered with fog. On the other side of the lake, where the mist concealed the shore, her imagination pictured villages, clumps of trees, a castle, and a stone tower at the entrance to a harbour. She began telling herself a story about this castle and the fabulous and heroic people who inhabited it. At the top of her vision, just under her forehead, pictures formed and moved, and she heard the light murmur of voices. She felt that she was perhaps going to faint, and yet she did not feel unwell. She knew that if she focused her mind and her will in some way that she never had before, something wonderful would happen. She groped to find the key that would unlock this door, and the knowledge came to her that it was a matter of collecting the magnetic forces of her whole body and concentrating them at a single point in her breast, just where the chest bone ended. A kind of blackness came over her, and she was no longer aware of her limbs or the rest of her body. Through the fog on the lake she saw an immense fish with fins at its tail lying on a kind of a raft. It remained motionless as the raft moved slowly forward, but she knew it was not dead. The murmur of voices was obliterated by another sound, a buzz as of a million bees. Then a woman’s voice—a woman, as she could clearly tell, neither very young nor very old, perhaps of her own age-spoke a single word: Gioconda. She forced her spirit to ask, What? and then What? again. But there was no answer. The fish gradually faded, the murmur of bees died away, and there was only the fog. Moira came to herself and found she was lying on the grassy bank with several passers-by bending anxiously over her.
She went to a restaurant and had a bowl of broth and a rusk, which restored her strength a little. Later that day she sat at the window of her hotel room looking out over the lake. The sun had come out now and burned the fog away. On the other side of the lake she could clearly see the town of Friedrichshafen and its church with two steeples. There was no castle as far as she could see. A little down the lake front from Friedrichshafen a familiar shape floated on the water, the giant fish she had seen in her trance or fainting fit. It rested on a raft, just as she had seen it through the fog, and under its belly was a smaller fish with black dots along its side. Tiny water-bugs clung at other places on its body. Moira watched for a long time, until finally the fish rose up into the air and disappeared over the clouds to the east.
The rational part of Moira told her that earlier she had somehow glimpsed the dirigible through the fog, which had perhaps lifted for a moment or two when she had not noticed it. But the rational part of her was not now the part she wished to listen to. The power of her Visions had changed. No more were they pictures and voices that she conjured up out of her imagination for private pageants that diverted and amused her. Now they came from elsewhere, from some power in the ether, and they showed her things that were really happening in other parts of the world, or would happen in the future, or had happened in the past. She saw the Eiffel Tower, shrouded in mist like the giant fish, before she had ever been to Paris. She saw a train lying on its side while the dying cried out in pain, and the next day she read about the wreck in a newspaper. She saw a large brick house in London, set in trees with an iron gate in front of it, and she knew for a certainty that she would enter that house some day. The voices said things that she sometimes did not understand. The soul can travel … and then no more; the sentence was unfinished. The light is coming was complete and made sense but was still mysterious. She never again heard the single word that was spoken as she gazed out over the Bodensee; it was only later, when she went to Paris for the first time, that she visited the Louvre and found that the Italian name for the picture we call the Mona Lisa is La Gioconda, and that it means “The woman who smiles. “
She was still able to conjure up her imaginary pageants at will, but her True Visions came to her only when she fasted. As time went on she ate less and less. After a while she settled on the diet that she followed for the rest of her life: broth, rusks, and a little white meat of chicken, barely enough to sustain her. She became thin, almost e
maciated, but her flesh settled around her bones so snugly that she was without wrinkles except for a slight creepiness around the throat, which she concealed with scarves and high-necked gowns. Her hands were as meager as those of a medieval saint. Her flesh seemed to glow; it was slightly luminous in the dark. She was weak and faint much of the time, but she was sustained by the Astral body inside her.
When the War broke out she came to London and took a room in Brown’s Hotel. There she stayed for four years, engaged in charity work and concealing her occult powers from her fellow workers. She went on with her theosophical readings, in Madame Blavatsky and then in the more recently published work of Annie Besant. In an occult bookstore in Charing Cross Road she found her autobiography, published by an obscure press in India. This impressed her greatly. It was shortly after that, and not by coincidence, she thought, that she encountered an article about Mrs. Besant in the newspaper. She wrote her a note, and was invited to tea at her home near Regents Park. When her taxi drew up to the address in Avenue Road she saw the house she had glimpsed years before in her True Vision: the pink bricks, the peaked roof, the marble vestibule that enclosed the front door, even the wrought-iron gate with its golden spikes.
Mrs. Besant sat down on a William Morris divan and invited her to take an armchair. She was a woman no longer young, with gray hair which she brushed back in a pompadour like a boy. Her black dress was old-fashioned. She had a great simplicity about her, something of the air of a working woman. Moira was aware of other people lurking in the background or appearing for an instant in doorways: a young man who appeared to be Indian (it was he who had admitted her at the door), a pair of girls clad in black like their mistress, a dreamy old man in a salt-and-pepper suit. The tea was Indian, tasting of smoke and coriander.
Mrs. Besant was silent, waiting for her to speak.
The Carp Castle Page 17
