by Muriel Spark
Presently again, and Laurence said, ‘There are more interesting particulars about neurotic women. You never know what you mayn’t find on their persons and in their general carry-on.’
In the second pub, where a fair fat poet said to Caroline, ‘Tell me all about your visions, my dear’; and another poet, a woman with a cape and a huge mouth, said, ‘Is there much Satanism going on within the Catholic Church these days?’; and another sort of writer, a man of over fifty, asked Caroline who was her psycho-analyst, and told her who was his — at this pub Caroline collected, one way and another, that the Baron had been mentioning this and that about her, to the ageless boys and girls who dropped in on him at his bookshop in Charing Cross Road.
The fat poet went steadily on about Caroline’s ‘visions’; he said they would be good for her publicity. Caroline and Laurence had been on short drinks, and both were rather lit up.
‘Wonderful publicity,’ they both agreed.
And the over-fifty, in his brown coat of fur-fabric, persisted, ‘I could tell you of a psychiatrist who —’
‘We know one,’ Laurence said, ‘who analyses crazy pavements.’
Caroline told the girl in the cape, did she know that Eleanor Hogarth had deserted the Baron?
‘No!’
‘Yes. He put me up for the night at his flat last week. All her things were gone. Not even a photograph. He only mentioned her once. He said she was away on tour, which was true; he said nothing about the break. Then Laurence found out definitely — he finds out everything, of course.’
‘Gone off with someone else?’
‘Don’t know, really. But she’s left him, not he her; I know that.’
‘Poor Willi.’
‘Oh, one can’t blame her,’ said Caroline, satisfied that the story would now spread.
The girl in the cape said, ‘Have you tried to convert the Baron?’
‘Me? No.’
‘R.C.s usually try to convert everyone, however hopeless. I thought that was a sort of obligation.’
For good measure, Caroline quoted of the Baron what she heard said of someone else: ‘He exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an Englishman.’
Indeed, the Baron was rather scrupulous about his English observances and confident that he had the English idea, so that his contempt for the English, their intellect, their manners, arose from a vexation that they did not conform better to the idea. To this effect, Caroline exchanged her views on the Baron with the girl in the cape.
‘But you know,’ said the girl, ‘there’s another side to Willi Stock. He’s an orgiast on the quiet.’
‘A what?’
‘Goes in for the Black Mass. He’s a Satanist. Probably that’s why Eleanor left him. She’s so awfully bourgeois.’
Caroline suddenly felt oppressed by the pub and the people. That word ‘bourgeois’ had a dispiriting effect on her evening — it was part of the dreary imprecise language of this half-world she had left behind her more than two years since.
Laurence was talking to the blond fat poet who was inviting him to a party at someone else’s house next week, describing the sort of people who would be present; and as Caroline got up, Laurence caught her eye just as this man was saying, ‘You can’t afford to miss it.’
Laurence piloted her out to the taxi, for she had been wobbly even when they arrived. But the momentary revulsion had sobered her.
They went to a coffee house, then on to the West End, to the Pylon, where, Caroline thought, thank God the lights are dim and the people not too distinguishable. The West End was another half-world of Caroline’s past.
Eleanor Hogarth had a close look at the couple moving in the sleepy gloom before her. They had a square foot of floor-space, which they utilized with sweet skill, within its scope manoeuvring together like creatures out of natural history. This fascinated Eleanor; she was for a few moments incredulous at the sight of Caroline and Laurence in these surroundings, since she had never seen them before in a nightclub, nor dancing.
Eleanor waved from her table; it was too far away from them to call, decently. Eventually Caroline saw. ‘Oh, see, there’s Eleanor.’
And there she was, with her business partner, white-haired young-faced Ernest Manders. This was Laurence’s uncle, his father’s youngest brother who had gone into ballet instead of Manders’ Figs in Syrup.
When Laurence was quite little he had informed his mother, ‘Uncle Ernest is a queer.’
‘So he is, pet,’ she answered happily, and repeated the child’s words to several people before she learned from her husband the difference between being a queer and just being queer. After this, it became a family duty to pray for Uncle Ernest; it was understood that no occasion for prayers should pass without a mention of this uncle.
And with some success apparently, because in his fortieth year, when his relations with men were becoming increasingly violent, he gave them up for comfort’s sake; not that he ever took to women as a substitute. Laurence had remarked to Caroline one day, ‘I’ve gradually had to overcome an early disrespect for my Uncle Ernest.’
‘Because he was a homosexual?’
‘No. Because we were always praying specially for him.’
He was a religious man and likeable. Caroline got on well with him. She said he was her sort of Catholic, critical but conforming. Ernest always agreed with Caroline that the True Church was awful, though unfortunately, one couldn’t deny, true.
She could not much bear Eleanor these days, though it was through Eleanor that she had first met Laurence. At one time these women were friends, exceedingly of a kind; that was at Cambridge, when, in their boxy rooms, they had leaned on the ignoble wooden fittings which were stained with rings from cocoa-mugs, and talked of this and that; mostly about the insolence of their fellow students and the insolence of their elders, for both girls had potential talents unrecognized. They were united in discontentment with the place as a place; its public-tiled wash-rooms, its bed-sitting-rooms, and other apartments so insolently designed. Eleanor left after a couple of terms to go into ballet. She might easily have gone to an art school, for she also had the art-school gift. It was Eleanor who had removed from one of the ground-floor corridors, and from its place on a wall, the portrait of a former Principal, keeping it for a whole night, in the course of which, by means of innumerable small touchings, she had made a subtle and important alteration in the portrait, which remains undetected to this day.
The thing about Eleanor, Caroline held, was that her real talent was for mimicry, and so she could have taken up any trade with ease, because all she had to do was to mimic the best that had already been done in any particular line, and that gave the impression of the expert.
Caroline was abroad during Eleanor’s marriage; she did not know much about it, only that she had left her husband after the war, and under her married name had started a dancing school with a male partner. Ernest Manders. A few months later, Caroline and Laurence had set up together, by which time Eleanor’s relationship with the Baron was becoming established. What irritated Caroline now about her old friend was the fact that she had seemed not to change essentially in the years since their Cambridge days, and was apparently quite happy with herself as she was. Now Laurence was another like that. But Caroline could like in Laurence many characteristics which in others she could not tolerate. And she was aware of the irrationality and prejudice of all these feelings, without being able to stop feeling them.
But she said, so that her contempt for Eleanor should be concealed, ‘Look at the band-leader. Who does he look like?’ She mentioned a Cambridge don, with his rimless glasses and the sideways mouth.
Eleanor laughed and laughed. She had been drinking more than Caroline that evening. ‘So he does.’ Then she told Caroline a story from which it emerged that this don was dead.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Caroline, being shocked then that Eleanor had laughed at her joke. When she saw Caroline involuntarily putting her face serious
, Eleanor affirmed, ‘But the band boy is the image of the man, just the same.’
Then Eleanor started picking out other members of the band, likening them to men they had agreed in despising during their friendship days. And she got Caroline to laugh, putting their meeting on a basis of workable humour, considering they were supposed to be enjoying themselves: and this was only possible by reference to the one kindly association between the two women, their college friendship. Caroline got over her annoyance at being caught out putting on a grave religious face when Eleanor had laughed at a dead man. And while she entered into Eleanor’s amusement, she felt almost dumb about her suspicion that Eleanor was humouring her on account of her neurosis. She was right; this was exactly Eleanor’s idea as she sat with her dark-brown head leaning over towards Caroline’s much darker brown.
Two bottles of gin had appeared out of the gloom. Laurence, on his third drink from the first bottle, said, ‘I’ve never felt more sober in my life. Some occasions, it just won’t “take”, you simply can’t get drunk.’
Eleanor looked sorry for him, as if she knew he had worry on his mind from Caroline. This annoyed Caroline, because she knew he was worrying about his grandmother most of all.
While she danced with Ernest, who was weird to dance with, flexible, almost not there at all, so that she felt like a missile directed from a far distance, she saw Laurence examining Eleanor’s cigarette case in his nosey way, and thought, ‘He keeps trying to detect whatever it is he’s looking for in life.’ She admired his ability to start somewhere repeatedly; his courage; even if it was only in a cigarette case.
Soon, Laurence and Eleanor were dancing, then she saw that they sat down, and that Eleanor was talking in a confiding way; Eleanor was making small circular movements with her glass, stopping only to sigh reflectively into it before she drank, as often happens towards the end of a drinking night, when a woman confides in a man about another man.
Round the walls of the Pylon, so far as the walls could be discerned, were large gilt picture frames. Inside each, where the picture should be, was a square of black velvet, this being the Pylon’s sort of effectiveness. As she smoothed her slight feet with Ernest, so limp, over their portion of dancing-floor, Caroline caught her view of Eleanor’s head, described against one of the black squares of velvet in the background, just like a framed portrait, indistinct, in need of some touching-up.
FIVE
‘I said, “Willi, this can’t go on, it simply can not go on.”‘ Eleanor was getting maudlin. She was not a neurotic particularly, but that was not why Laurence didn’t much care for her. It was only that he rather liked the Baron, and Eleanor, though her infidelities were her own affair, had never kept very quiet about them, except to the Baron himself who never suspected them.
Laurence, gazing intently at her small gold cigarette case as if it were the book of life itself, nodded his acknowledgement of her confidences.
‘If he had been unfaithful,’ she went on, ‘I could have understood, I could have forgiven. But this obscenity — and apparently it’s been going on for years — I never suspected. Of course I always knew he was interested in diabolism and that sort of thing, but I thought it was only theory. He had all the books, and I thought like a collector you know. But apparently it’s been going on for years, the Black Masses, and they do frightful things, ask Caroline, she’ll know all about the Black Mass. I feel it’s a sort of personal insult to me personally, as if I’d found him out dabbling with a whore. And I said, “Willi, you’ve got to choose, it’s either me or these foul practices — you can’t have both.” Because I tell you, Laurence, it was an insult to my intelligence apart from everything else. He said he was amused by my attitude. Amused. I’m not melodramatic, and furthermore, I’m not religious, but I do know that the Black Mass has a profoundly evil influence truly, Laurence. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t done something to Caroline.’
‘How d’you mean, dear?’
‘Well, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that she spent a night with Willi recently —’
‘Yes, he was sweet to her really. She was ill at the time. But I think that was the climax, somehow. I think she’s getting better now.’
‘But I heard that she started hearing things after that night. I heard that and you can’t help hearing things when people tell you, however unlikely.’
Laurence did not quite get the hang of this sentence, and while he was working it out Eleanor persisted, ‘Hasn’t Caroline been hearing things?’
‘About you, dear?’
‘No, voices. Spirits. Hearing —’
‘Come and dance,’ said Laurence.
This was their second attempt. She was even less steady than before, and it took him all his time to keep her upright. He said, ‘Too many people, what d’you think?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s sit down and drink.’
Ernest and Caroline were already returned. Eleanor said immediately, ‘Caroline, what do you think of the Black Mass?’
Caroline’s mood had become gay and physical; she was still jiggering about with her hands in time to the music. ‘No idea,’ she answered, ‘but ask the Baron. He’s the expert, so I’m told.’ Then she remembered that Eleanor had left the Baron, so she said, ‘Laurence, stop peering at Eleanor’s cigarette case, like an old Jew looking for the carat mark.’
Laurence said, ‘I’m trying to read the motto.’
On the front of the case was a tiny raised crest. Caroline poked her head in beside Laurence’s with exaggerated curiosity. ‘A wolf’s head,’ said Laurence. ‘What’s the motto? I can’t read it.’
‘Fidelis et— I can’t remember, for the moment,’ Eleanor said. ‘I did know. It’s the Hogarth crest. Only a Victorian rake-up, I imagine. My ex-husband gave me that case for a wedding present. He had a passion for putting his family crest on everything. Spoons, hair-brushes, you never saw the like. Caroline, seriously, don’t you think the evil influence that’s over us all is due to these Black Masses? I’ve found out about Willi. I suppose you’ve known all the time, but I didn’t dream. And it takes place at Notting Hill Gate, as you probably know.’
Laurence had given her a weak drink, but now, sipping it, she noticed this, and said to Ernest reproachfully, ‘I’m drinking lemonade, virtually. Don’t be so mean with that gin, Ernest.’
Caroline was fascinated by Eleanor’s performance. Indeed, it was only an act; the fascination of Eleanor was her entire submersion in whatever role she had to play. There did not seem to be any question of Eleanor’s choosing her part, it was forced on her, she was enslaved by it. Just now, she appeared to be under the control of liquor; but she was also and more completely under the control of her stagey act: that of a scatty female who’d been drinking: wholeheartedly, her personality was involved, so that it was impossible to distinguish between Eleanor and the personality which possessed her during those hours; as well try to distinguish between the sea and the water in it.
Caroline was fascinated and appalled. In former days, Eleanor’s mimicry was recognizable. She would change her personality like dresses according to occasion, and it had been fun to watch, and an acknowledged joke of Eleanor’s. But she had lost her small portion of detachment; now, to watch her was like watching doom. As a child Caroline, pulling a face, had been warned, ‘If you keep doing that it will stick one day.’ She felt, looking at Eleanor, that this was actually happening to the woman. Her assumed personalities were beginning to cling; soon one of them would stick, grotesque and ineradicable.
‘She’s got the Black Mass on the brain,’ Ernest was sighing.
‘So would you if you’d been living with a diabolist,’ said Eleanor, contorting her face according to her role of the moment. And she drawled, placing a hand on Caroline’s hand, looking intensely into her eyes, ‘Caroline, my poor Caroline. You’re haunted by spirits, aren’t you? And you know who’s behind it, don’t you?’
The performance was becoming more and more co
rny. Caroline tried to revert to their earlier farce about the band and their Cambridge friends.
‘But she’s haunted,’ said Eleanor, still gazing at Caroline.
Caroline had never felt less haunted. She was almost shocked to find how she seemed to derive composure from the evidence of her friend’s dissolution.
‘I’ve never felt less haunted,’ Caroline said.
‘I’m haunted,’ said Ernest, ‘by the fact that we’re nearly bankrupt, and Eleanor has abandoned our only form of security.’
‘Willi can’t withdraw financially. But he’ll ruin us all another way. I know it. I feel it. He’s working a tremendous power against us, Eleanor drivelled.
‘What was your husband’s name?’ Laurence asked her.
‘You are haunted, my dear girl,’ Eleanor insisted, still gazing upon Caroline’s face.
‘Hogarth.’ It was Ernest who supplied the name, smiling like a conjurer who has produced the rabbit.
‘Mervyn,’ said Eleanor belatedly.
‘I believe I’ve met him. Does he live at Ladle Sands in Sussex by any chance?’
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘Don’t remind me please. He ought to be in prison. I’ve had a tragic life, Laurence. Ernest, haven’t I had a tragic life?’
‘Desperately,’ said Ernest.
‘And the tragedy of that poor cripple boy,’ said Eleanor. ‘Caroline, I’ve never told you about my marriage. What a mess. He had a son by a former marriage, quite helpless. What could I do? These tragedies occur everywhere through influences of evil spirits, that I do believe. You ye given me sheer lemonade, Ernest, don’t be mean with the gin.’
‘You’re getting tight,’ said Ernest.
‘Can you blame me? Caroline, do you realize the sheer potency of the Black Mass? It’s going on all the time.’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s only an infantile orgy. It can’t do much harm.’
