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SUBLIMATED
RELATIONS
OR
THE
Long
Prose
Copyright
©
2011 John O'Loughlin
____________
CONTENTS
Chapters
1-12
__________
CHAPTER
ONE
He
gently
closed the front door of his parents' house behind him and,
pulling his scarf more tightly round his neck, set off at a brisk pace
for
home. It was a rather cold night and, as
he hurried along, great plumes of escaping breath were
quickly dispersed into the chill air. He
was somewhat relieved that the once-yearly obligation to visit his
parents for
Christmas had been successfully dispatched and that he was once more a
free man
- free, that is, to please himself.
Not that their company
unduly oppressed him! On the contrary,
they did their best to make his stay a merry one, having provided a
copious
roast lunch and a sufficiency of wine and/or sherry.
But, even so, it was a relief that the social
pressure to be on one's best behaviour had if not entirely vanished
then, at
any rate, been temporarily relaxed, and he was accordingly free to be
his usual
informal self.
One's
best behaviour? No, that wasn't
entirely true! More accurately, the pressure to tune-in, as it were, to one's
parents' standard
of Christmas and behave in a manner which suggested that no alternative
standard was either possible or indeed desirable. Yes,
that
was it! He was escaping from the
pressure of that, as
also, if the truth were known, from the even worse pressure of having
been in
close proximity to his stepfather's wretched cold and of having had to
pretend
that it didn't really inconvenience him in any way.
But, really, what a gross inconvenience it had
been! It was quite a stinker the man was
suffering
from, a most objectionable stinker!
For a moment Timothy
Byrne was on the verge of cursing his stepfather for having had the
untimely
misfortune to catch a rotten cold at Christmas, but, mindful of the
festive
spirit, he stifled the thought as best he could and replaced it with a
charitable commiseration towards Richard Briley
for
the rotten luck he'd had ... to fall victim to such a sordid fate at so
inopportune a time. In fact, he forced
himself to feel sorry for the man and to offer him, in retrospect, what
private
sympathy he could. Yet even then it
wasn't possible for Timothy to ignore the self-pity which suddenly
welled up,
like flood waters, inside him at the recollection of his having had to
sit in
uncomfortably close proximity to Mr Briley
on a
number of occasions over Christmas and not only risk being infected
with the
stinker himself, but, no less distastefully, listen to the incessant
snivelling
which issued from the old man's snot-laden nose. Really,
it
was enough to make one weep!
Crossing over one of the
busy main roads which prominently divided his part of Haringey from
theirs, he
hurried his steps along the north London streets still faster, as much,
in
effect, to escape the memory of his stepfather's threatening germs ...
as to
get back to his flat as quickly as possible, lest additional threats
from
unseen quarters lay in sordid wait for him!
Poor Mr Briley, it was really most
unkind of
nature to have inflicted such a bad cold on him during that brief
period in the
year when, birthdays notwithstanding, one least wished to suffer germs. Most unkind!
Yet, unfortunately, that was generally the way with nature,
which was
unconcerned with human wishes and the sporadic attempts man might make
to
approximate to a heavenly condition.
Mindful, one might almost say, of its own wayward interests. Ignorant of Christmas.
For what was Christmas,
after all, but a concerted attempt by man to approximate to Heaven in
the face,
if needs be, of natural opposition? A
time when one remembered the birth of Christ and gave thanks for the
spiritual
example He was to set. A
time
when one endeavoured to live more closely in Christ's light
and refrain from sin. But what
did nature care about that? Not a
frigging jot! It made no specific effort
to emulate man and call a truce for a few days.
On the contrary, one was just as likely to catch a cold on
Christmas
day, if germs were in the air, as at any other time.
And if the weather had been particularly
inclement before Christmas, it wasn't likely to improve just to suit
men. It could even get worse!
Fortunately that had not
been the case this year, and, as he continued on his brooding way,
Timothy felt
gratitude for the fact that the weather had remained comparatively dry
and mild
these past few days, thus discouraging the rapid spread of harmful
germs. Yet the fact of Mr Briley's
cold was still bad enough, and even if he, Timothy John Byrne, hadn't
caught
it, nevertheless he had suffered from it in a certain sense, both
psychologically and physically, and that was no joke!
His Christmas hadn't exactly proved to be the
most congenial of experiences, even if it could have been a damn sight
worse. Still, his parents had generally
been kind to him, and together, in spite of their temperamental
differences,
they had endeavoured to maintain an atmosphere of peace and joy whilst
in
one-another's persevering company.
Yes, a kind of crude
approximation to the heavenly Beyond had been achieved, in spite of
whatever
opposition the temporal world had contrived to place in their way. Even with Mr Briley's
constant snivelling and the consequent risk of infection, these past
few days
had retained a seasonal quality which, on the whole, was fairly
pleasant, if a
little lacking in excitement. For there
could be no question that Timothy had eaten well and, despite his
customary
abstinence, imbibed a bottle or two of quality sherry, not to mention
sat in
front of some interesting films on television and spent an hour or so
profitably reading philosophy in one of his parents' spare rooms. And, of course, there had been some
conversation with his mother - Mr Briley
being a
rather laconic bloke who preferred not to enter into conversation with
him even
when he wasn't ill - which had proved more the exception than the rule,
and
passed the time quite pleasantly.
Yet even as he hurried
across another busy road, Timothy reflected that this Christmas could
have been
a lot better, a much finer approximation to Heaven than theirs had
been, and
not only on account of his stepfather's cold, by any means! No, on a number of counts. But, alas, his parents had prevented it from
being such by their emphasis on traditional, or sensual, approximations
to the
Beyond, and had thus made it virtually obligatory for him to follow
suit. The ideas which were now welling-up
in his
conscious mind, like molten lava, would hardly appeal to them,
well-meaning
though they undoubtedly were. No, they
couldn't be expected to appreciate what he now considered a higher way
of
celebrating Christmas, a way which, instead of emphasizing downward
self-transcendence, put the emphasis firmly on upward
self-transcendence and
was accordingly closer to Heaven, to what Timothy liked to think of as
the
spiritual climax to human evolution in the not-too-distant future.
However, being average
sensual people, his mother and stepfather could only celebrate
Christmas in a
fashion commensurate with their average sensuality, not in a fashion
which he
now regarded as of a higher and altogether more agreeable order. Yet what was true of them was no less true of
the great majority of people, who were likewise indisposed to change
their
habits and celebrate Christmas in any but a sensual way.
And as he neared his flat, a poignant truth
suddenly dawned on him. Like it or not,
the majority of people's attempts to approximate to a heavenly
condition at
Christmas only resulted in their ending-up in a condition closer to
Hell, in
which their customary sensual habits were intensified to a point of
gluttony
and drunkenness, if not lechery as well!
Yes, that was the ironic
truth of the matter! For the average
sensual man Christmas was simply an intensification of his average
sensual
habits, and thus, in certain respects, an approximation not to Heaven
but to
its beastly antithesis. Society hadn't
yet evolved to a stage where the great majority of people were disposed
to
approximate, no matter how humbly or tentatively, to the heavenly
Beyond
through upward self-transcendence.
Consequently the only reasonable alternative to average
day-to-day
consciousness for a relatively short period of time lay, for them, in
downward
self-transcendence, in the gratification of the senses rather than of
the
spirit, and thus immersion in the subconscious instead of the superconscious. For
which, as Timothy well knew, food and drink were eminently suitable!
And so, by a curious
paradox, the Devil was arguably given more acknowledgement,
by
a
majority of people at Christmas, than God, and a kind of sensuous
approximation to Hell triumphed over the Christian world during that
time. Only in a minority of cases was it
likely
that the godly in man would be given its due and duly acknowledged, and
as
Timothy drew closer to his small flat he realized, with some regret,
that he
hadn't been among that minority of higher types this Christmas but, on
the
contrary, had consumed more than his customary amounts of food and
drink!
Maybe next year -
assuming he wasn't living in the same place and had the means to be
more
independent of his parents for Christmas - he would be able to
celebrate
Christ's birth in a manner more suited to his tastes, and thus become a
part of
that tiny minority who acknowledged the superiority of the spirit over
the
senses at Christmas, thereby upward self-transcending.
He hoped so anyway, since he had become
somewhat dissatisfied, no thanks to his parents, with the traditional
way of
celebrating it!
But what, exactly, would
this alternative to sensual indulgence be?
He had arrived at the front door to his ground-floor flat and
duly let
himself in. Yes, what exactly? Quickly, almost impatiently, he removed his
black leather zipper and matching scarf and hung them on the metal
clothes pegs
just inside the door. Then he hurried
into his small living-room and immediately switched on the electric
fire there. Its two coiled filaments were
aglow in no
time, and he gratefully sat in front of it and rubbed the cold from his
frozen
hands. Yes, well, to approximate more to
Heaven than to Hell at Christmas meant that one would have to reduce
one's
consumption of food and drink for a start, and thus avoid the
temptation to
become both a glutton and a drunkard.
Whether one went as far as limiting oneself to bread and water
instead
of, say, roast and wine was another thing.
But one could at least make do with a less sensual fare than one
was
ordinarily accustomed to, and certainly avoid alcohol, that leading
enemy of
the spiritual life! Milk, tea, coffee,
or some fruit juice was morally preferable to booze, though not perhaps
as good
as cola.
Timothy smiled slightly
at the thought of it and continued to gently rub his hands together in
front of
the electric fire. He was still feeling
quite bloated from the turkey-sandwich supper his mother had provided
for him,
and not a little conscious of the soporific effects which the last
glass of
sherry was having on his mind. He was
still thinking of heavenly approximations from the disadvantage-point,
as it
were, of hellish approximations, or so it seemed. But
he
hadn't imbibed that much sherry in
all, and was accordingly still capable of lucid thought, thanks in part
to the
sobering influence of the cold weather during his brisk walk home. So, as a step in the right direction of
upward self-transcendence, it would be necessary to minimize the part
played by
downward self-transcendence by curtailing one's sensual intake. That much was obvious.
But
what else? What about the actual
feeding of the spirit? Would reading a
paperback throughout the Christmas holiday suffice to take care of that? An image of a painting by Daniele
Crespi entitled The
Meal
of St. Charles Borromeo, in which
the Saint was depicted reading the
Bible whilst eating a frugal meal of bread and water,
came soaring into his mind's eye and to some extent answered that
vexing
question. Yes, reading would serve
the
needs
of the spirit and contribute towards establishing an
approximation to
the heavenly Beyond, or Omega Point, as Teilhard
de Chardin had called the projected
culmination of spiritual
evolution. But a rather crude
approximation to it, one had to admit, insofar as only the lower
reaches of the
spirit would be acknowledged and served - those reaches in which the
intellect
had its throne. The greater and higher
part of the spirit, the soul, would languish unfed, undernourished, and
ignored.
Thus while reading would
be better than dozing, one could approximate more closely to the
heavenly
Beyond by meditating throughout the Christmas holiday, thereby allowing
one's
spirit to expand on a wave of blessed peace.
Stillness, quietness, alert passivity, joy ... all these
consequences of
Transcendental Meditation would bring one closer to heavenly salvation
than
ever reading could, even when the book in one's hands was of an
elevated order,
and so result in a finer Christmas. Yet
if a few days given-up to meditating still seemed too much ... well
then, one
could always divide one's time between reading and meditating, or
meditating
and watching some ennobling film or listening to some inspiring music. As long as the spirit rather than the body
was being acknowledged, no matter how imperfectly, one would be in
alliance
with that tiny minority of higher types.
Yet
what else? Was there anything
besides culture and meditation that could be indulged in over Christmas
in
order to approximate as closely as possible to Heaven?
Undoubtedly meditation was the best thing for
any length of time. But if, by any
chance, one felt one had to have recourse to some kind of concrete
substitute
for alcohol or tobacco, what was there?
Ah, there was indeed something that could be indulged in but
which
wasn't legal at present, and that was mind-expanding hallucinogens like
LSD,
the acronym for lysergic acid diethylamide.
Whether LSD, for example, would be legalized in the near or
distant
future ... remained to be seen. But,
whatever its ultimate fate, there could be no denying that its
synthetic
constitution distinguished it from natural drugs, or drugs which either
grew
naturally or were less than fully synthetic, like tobacco, alcohol,
opium, and
morphine, rendering it an altogether different proposition from them.
For all the 'natural'
drugs - in short, everything that grew from or owed their origins to
the earth
- were inevitably stamped with nature's imprint and were thus of a
sensual
essence. Whenever one had recourse to
them,
in whatever doses, the result was an intensification of sensual
indulgence and
therefore a downward self-transcendence.
According to their strength and the amounts imbibed, they
imposed
varying degrees of subconscious stupor, ranging from the shallow in
tobacco to
the deep in opium or morphine. Being of
natural origin, they could only appeal to the senses, not the spirit,
and thus
were aligned with Hell rather than Heaven.
The deeper the level of subconscious stupor imposed by them, the
more
evil, it seemed to Timothy, they were, so it wasn't altogether
surprising that
society had sought to protect itself from the most potent natural drugs
by
making them illegal and punishing those who trafficked in them. Only the relatively less evil ones, including
tobacco and alcohol, were officially sanctioned and accorded a degree
of social
respectability, even though they were by no means without extremely
serious
consequences, as lung cancer and sclerosis of the liver made more than
adequately clear! Hopefully, a day would
come when even tobacco and alcohol would be officially discountenanced,
and all
degrees of downward self-transcendence through natural drugs duly
proscribed
or, at the very least, discouraged. But,
at present, we were still living in an age when such evils were to a
certain
extent inevitable and somehow relevant to the times.
However, perhaps there
would also come a time when hallucinogens like LSD would be legalized,
and
those who wanted to use it could do so without fearing prosecution? At which thought Timothy clicked his tongue
and, ceasing to rub his hands together, sat back comfortably in his
armchair. Yes, for LSD was a synthetic
drug, and therefore it acted on the superconscious
rather than the subconscious. It
resulted, as a rule, in visionary experiences of a transcendent,
translucent,
and altogether mystical order, opening the door to the Beyond and thus
giving
rise to upward self-transcendence. It
was divine rather than diabolic, uplifting rather than degrading,
enlightening
rather than depressing.
Yes, if sanity was to
prevail in the world and evolution continue on its upward curve, then LSD would certainly have a role to play in
the future
as probably the
drug of transcendental man.
The centuries of tobacco and alcohol consumption, not to mention
the
illicit consumption of dope and the harder natural drugs, would have to
be
supplanted by the centuries of LSD consumption, in which man aspired
towards
God, through expanded consciousness, rather than regressed towards the
Devil in
varying degrees of subconscious stupor.
Then perhaps Christmas, or some such equivalent festival, would
be
celebrated with LSD instead of alcohol or tobacco.
Then Christmas would approximate more closely
to the heavenly Beyond for the great majority of people, and so be a
much
superior occasion to what it was at present.
For at present it was all too under nature's
sensuous
influence. Only by overcoming
nature, Timothy believed, would man eventually attain to God, since the
mundane
and the transcendent were ever different, if not antithetical,
propositions.
But, in the meantime -
no, one couldn't expect overnight miracles.
The majority of people were simply not ready for LSD and,
consequently,
it had to remain illegal. Only a
comparatively
small number of people would be capable of using it profitably and
sensibly,
whereas, for the average sensual man, it would probably prove either a
blank or
a danger. And not only to himself! One shuddered at the thought of what might
happen if a crowd of football thugs or other hooligans were to get
their coarse
hands on the divine hallucinogen! Why,
they were bad enough under the influence of lager!
No, it was pretty
obvious that the one drug seriously capable of effecting an upward
self-transcendence would have to wait a while yet for official approval. There was no sense in casting pearls before
swine! When society as a whole had
progressed to a higher stage of evolution, a stage transcending
anything we now
knew, then perhaps an official change-of-heart would be possible. But, in the meantime ... ah! one would just have to make do, in a majority of
cases, with
alcohol for Christmas. And
if
one found that infra dignum?
Well, one could always meditate or read a book - which was
exactly what
Timothy Byrne intended to do next Christmas, all being well!
Getting up from his
armchair, he ambled over to the windows and pulled their
floral-patterned
curtains across. He had quite overlooked
them when first entering the room, but it didn't really matter too much. Few people would have been interested in
staring-in at him and, besides, the low wall and front-garden hedge
provided
his room with a certain amount of seclusion anyway.
Yet he was reminded, by the sight of a large
Christmas card standing on the small table just to one side of the
windows,
that he had been invited out to dinner on New Year's Eve, so he
hastened to
pick it up and re-read its contents.
Yes, this late card,
only received on Christmas Eve, had come as quite a surprise to him,
particularly since he had met its sender but once, and then rather
briefly. Yet the man had shown what
seemed like genuine interest in his philosophy, and suggested the
possibility
of their dining together some time. So
it looked as though he had meant what he said.
Here, however, is what he had written:-
Dear
Timothy
Byrne,
Just a
brief note to wish you a Merry Christmas and invite you down to Rothermore House for dinner on New Year's Eve. You will recall that we discussed your most
recent publication together, earlier this month, and that I was quite
impressed
by it. Perhaps you would like to offer
me some further enlightenment on its difficult subject-matter in due
course? If so, then come down by early
afternoon train to Crowborough in
Yours
sincerely
Joseph
Handon (Viscount)
Timothy re-read the
invitation through twice and then replaced the rather picturesque card
on the
table. He was really quite baffled by
it, not having received any such invitation before.
And the fact that Handon
was a viscount came as something of a surprise to him.
He hadn't realized, at the time of their
first encounter, that he was dealing with a
peer of
the realm. Maybe that explained why the
invitation made mention of a dinner rather than a party?
It seemed to him quite posh really, not what
he would have expected at all. But,
still, what was he to make of it? Should
he accept?
He returned to his
single armchair and involuntarily began to warm his hands in front of
the
electric fire again. Crowborough? No, not a place he had ever been to
before? And Rothermore House?
He smiled at the thought of his arriving from the station by
taxi at a
large country house with fluted pilasters surmounted by Ionic or
Corinthian
capitals on the façade, and a large central pediment, with or without
relief
sculpture, over the architrave. Maybe,
on the other hand, it would be less classical, more baroque or even
gothic? He hadn't the faintest idea. Nevertheless, it was almost bound to be
large, imposing, spacious, and surrounded on all sides by plenty of
open land. Country houses were usually
like that, after
all.
Again he smiled to
himself and sat back in his armchair. He
wasn't sure whether or not to accept the invitation, especially since
he didn't
know much about Joseph Handon and had
absolutely no
idea who the other guests would be. It
wasn't as if he were exactly enamoured of country houses either, though
he had
retained a certain rather narrow aesthetic interest in one or two of
them,
compliments of some informal architectural studies in the reference
division of
his local library, several years before.
Yet, all things considered, perhaps the experience would prove
rewarding, confirming him in his suppositions and further enlightening
him
where aristocratic lifestyles like Viscount Handon's
were concerned. Yes, maybe he would
learn a thing or two from first-hand experience, as it were, of country
houses
and their inhabitants that contact with reference books had denied him? It was certainly worth considering anyway.
Still smiling, he
vacated his old armchair again and proceeded to slot an audio cassette
into the
tape-deck of his modest midi sound-system.
Boxing Day still had an hour to run and he was determined to
pass the
remaining time in as cultural a fashion as possible.
Some synth-based
modern jazz would, he supposed, enable him to do just that!
CHAPTER
TWO
At
length
the train arrived at Crowborough
station and a rather bored Timothy Byrne alighted from the empty
second-class
compartment, in which he had sat cross-legged for most of the journey,
and
slowly made his way towards the ticket barrier.
Only a handful of other people had got off the train with him
and he
wondered, as he passed through the exit, whether there might not be another person bound for Rothermore
House among their number.
Once outside the station
he quickly engaged the services of a waiting taxi, and presently found
himself
being driven through a series of narrow country lanes in the general
direction
of Rothermore House.
It was almost four o'clock and he hoped that his arrival there
wouldn't
be too early; though he had no way of telling from the invitation at
exactly
what time the viscount would be expecting his other guests to arrive. Perhaps most of them were already there? He mentally shuddered at the thought of it
and sought distraction from that prospect by scanning the surrounding
fauna-and-flora of the passing countryside.
He never liked being the last or nearly last guest to arrive
anywhere.
"Been
out this way before, mate?" the cabby asked,
addressing his passenger via the driving mirror.
"No," Timothy
replied, a bit startled by this unexpected intrusion into his sordid
reflections.
"Nearly there
now," said the cabby, who speedily steered the taxi round a couple of
sharp bends and then brought it to a gradual halt a hundred or so yards
along a
relatively straight road, which appeared to lead nowhere.
On one side, a view of
trees and hills. On the other
side, a tall gateway presented its black steel bars to their attention. It was slightly ajar, and stood between high
brick walls lined with trees and bushes.
"I'll take you up
the driveway if you'd like," the cabby offered, half-turning round in
his
seat.
"Is it a long
one?" Timothy asked.
"At least a coupla hundred yards," the cabby informed him.
"Right,
thanks."
Having got out of the
taxi to push the gate open, the cabby returned to his seat and
restarted the
engine, which had in the meantime spluttered out. "You're
the
second geezer I've driven up
here today," he revealed, as they got under way again.
"Oh, really?"
responded Timothy, who hadn't expected to be informed of that fact! "Perhaps I won't be the last," he
commented.
"Perhaps
not,
mate."
The taxi reached the end
of the driveway and there, suddenly, the expanse of Rothermore
House loomed menacingly ahead, no more than seventy yards away. One had the feeling, curiously, of coming out
of a jungle and into the open again.
"I'm afraid this is
as far as I can go, mate," the cabby informed him on a slightly
apologetic
note, as unexpected as it was strange.
Timothy felt like
saying: "That's quite far enough," since he had no wish to be driven
right up to the large front doors of such an imposing house in a bright
red Cortina, but simply nodded his head
and got out. Then he paid the driver and,
reciprocating
his New Year wishes, stood back to allow the taxi to turn around in the
narrow
space provided and speed back down the driveway.
So this was it!
He stood a moment stock-still, staring across
the wide expanse of front garden which framed the large house. He hadn't been far wrong in his conjectures
as to what the place would look like, for it did indeed possess fluted
pilasters surmounted by Corinthian capitals.
But where he had imagined a central pediment there was a
balustrade,
upon which a couple of weighty-looking sculptural urns were standing,
and this
balustrade extended along the entire length of the façade, reminding
one, in a
way, of crenellated battlements. Thus a two-storey house, with twelve
vertically-elongated windows on each story - six to either side of the aediculated entrance.
Where had he seen a building like this before?
Yes, of course! A book on English
architecture in the local
library's reference division had shown him a photograph of
Realizing that he
couldn't very well continue to stand out in the cold and gaze up at the
building as though he had nothing better to do, he forced himself on
towards
his objective. The crunching of his
steps on the gravel path which led through the English garden made him
feel
rather self-conscious and exposed to view as he neared the large front
entrance, and he carefully avoided looking at the windows from fear of
seeing
someone behind them. The house seemed to
tower above him like some fearful monster the nearer he got to it,
making him
feel rather dwarfed as well as self-conscious.
He was almost wishing he hadn't accepted Joseph Handon's
invitation, as he climbed the steps leading to the framed entrance. Almost, but not quite! For he was determined to
brave this experience out until the end and learn what he could from it. And he was learning fast, because now, halted
just in front of the door, he realized that there was a world of
difference
between looking at photos of country houses and actually standing in
front of
one! The former he could tolerate, the
latter.... He shuddered with apprehension and pressed the bell. Now he was irrevocably committed.
In less than a minute it
was answered by a manservant, who, on receiving his name,
politely ushered him inside. Once there,
he took off his leather jacket and handed it, together with woollen
scarf, to
the man. He hoped that his sartorial
appearance would pass muster here, since he wasn't in the habit of
dressing
more conservatively, having burnt his last bridges, so to speak, of
conventional attire several years before.
His black denims and green sweatshirt were presentable enough,
he
thought, and his new white leather sneakers with black stripes
sufficiently
clean, in spite of the dust kicked up while crossing the gravel path. All in all, pretty typical of him these days,
and not something he had any desire to change, given his long-standing
aversion
to suits and ties and other sartorial manifestations of a more
conventional,
not to say bourgeois,
lifestyle.
"Now, sir, if you'd
just care to follow me," said the elderly servant, once he had
deposited
Timothy's jacket and scarf in a cloakroom to one side of the entrance
hall. Smilingly, he led the way across
the intervening space to a pair of double doors which, on reaching, he
threw
open with a polished gesture, to reveal one of the longest and largest
rooms
Timothy had ever beheld. Having
announced his name for the benefit of its occupants, the manservant
ushered him
in with formal politeness and then gently but firmly closed the doors
behind
him, leaving the young writer to his fate.
Never before had he felt as self-conscious as now, what with the
sight
of those already gathered there. He
might as well have been standing in the nude before a roomful of nubile
females, as standing in his usual informal clothes just inside the
doors of
this immense room!
But help was at hand in
the form of Lord Handon himself, who
beamed an
encouraging smile at him while swiftly approaching across the bright
blue
carpet which covered the greater part of the floor.
"So glad you could come," he
announced, extending a welcoming hand; though the six or seven yards he
had to
walk seemed to take an eternity for Timothy, who gratefully clasped the
outstretched hand when it finally arrived.
"I trust you had a pleasant journey?"
"Yes, quite
pleasant," the writer responded, blushing slightly.
"I'm a bit
out-of-the-way here, and wouldn't like to think that you'd got lost en
route
from the station," Lord Handon remarked.
"Oh, no trouble in
that respect," Timothy averred.
"Good! Well,
allow
me to introduce you to the
others," said the viscount and, taking his latest guest in tow, he led
the
way towards the centre of the room, where a small group of people were
seated
in a semicircle in front of a roaring open fire. There
was
hardly time for Timothy to get more
than an inkling of the extent and variety of his surroundings, as he
bashfully
accompanied the grey-haired peer back across the carpet.
Besides, he couldn't very well begin
investigating the room's contents as though he were in a museum. It was obligatory to ignore them, as though
stepping into such an ornately-furnished and expensively-decorated room
was a
commonplace affair, unworthy of more than a passing curiosity. The only thing that mattered was the series
of introductions which were about to befall him. It
was
impossible to concentrate on anything
else. "Allow me first of all to
present you to my wife, Pamela," the host obliged, extending his arm in
the direction of a medium-built lady with high cheekbones and a long
nose who
was seated nearest the fire. She at once
rose from her amply-cushioned armchair and held out a dainty hand for
Timothy
to shake.
"Delighted to meet
you, Mr Byrne," she said, smiling primly.
"And here is my
youngest daughter, Geraldine," rejoined Lord Handon,
leading
his
new guest's attention to the occupant of the next armchair, who
duly stood up and offered him a similar hand, albeit in a more
tentative
manner. She was wearing a straight
purple dress with black stockings, and had fine dark-brown hair which
was
tied-up in a bun on the crown of her head.
She couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen.
"Unfortunately, my
eldest daughter is celebrating New Year's Eve elsewhere," Lord Handon explained, for the benefit of his guest,
"so
you'll have to forego the pleasure of meeting her."
Scarcely
had the writer shaken hands with Geraldine than he was whisked-on to
the
occupant of the third armchair from the fire, who happened to be an
artist by
name of
"And here,"
Lord Handon announced, leading the way
past an empty
armchair to one occupied by a coloured girl of slender build, "is a
highly-talented young opera singer by name of Sarah Field, whom you may
well
have heard of or even heard sing."
"Indeed I
have," Timothy admitted, extending a nervous hand for its sixth shaking.
"Pleased to meet
you," said the singer, with a polite smile in due attendance. Her brown eyes sparkled gaily from the
reflection, in part, of the electric lights which issued from an
overhead
chandelier. She was tastefully attired
in a dark-green minidress with pale
stockings, and
wore her smooth dark hair combed back into a single plait which
stretched a
third of the way down her back. Her lips
were enhanced with pink lipstick, and pink was the preferred colour of
her eye
make-up. She was about the same height
as Timothy - a little short of tall.
"And, finally,
before the strain of encountering so many new faces proves too much for
you,
here's Miss Sheila Johnston, that excellent concert pianist of Scotch
origin,
whose graceful tone and touch gladden the heart," Lord Handon
smilingly revealed.
Miss Johnston held out a
firm muscular-looking hand for Timothy to shake and lowered her large
blue eyes
while he shook it. She was blushing from
the compliments of her host and smiled involuntary appreciation of his
flattery. Timothy she hardly seemed
conscious of and the handshake was uncomfortably one-sided.
"Good, that just
about takes care of everyone," Lord Handon
commented, simultaneously giving the writer a congratulatory slap on
the back,
or so it seemed to the latter. "But
for a couple of people yet to arrive, we're all
here," he added, before drawing Timothy's flagging attention to
the
vacant armchair in between Nigel Townley
and Sarah
Field, and motioning him to sit down, which he thankfully did, though
not
without a certain self-consciousness at actually taking his place there
amongst
the other guests. "Since we've all
had a glass or two of port this afternoon, I should be delighted if
you'd join
us in that respect," the host declared, beaming brightly.
"Very well,"
said Timothy, politely putting aside his natural aversion to such
drinks.
"One
port here!" Lord Handon requested
in an
extraordinarily loud tone-of-voice, bringing his butler, who stood at a
discreet remove from the armchairs, into action.
To his astonishment,
Timothy found the port being served up to him on a silver platter by
the
officiating servant - a slight, balding man with long grey whiskers and
a sober
mien, who bent down to facilitate service.
"Would anyone else
care for another?" the host asked, casting around the arc of his
guests. "No? Very well. That's
all thank you, Madley."
The old servant
straightened up and withdrew to the drinks cabinet across the far side
of the
room, where he noisily deposited the platter before taking up his
customary
stance, like a sentry on duty, unobtrusive and remote.
It appeared that he would have to stay there,
attentive and waiting, until his next summons, which, to Timothy's way
of thinking,
seemed rather strange.
Hardly had the young
newcomer got over the experience of being served port on a silver
platter than
he found himself being questioned by Lady Handon
as
to the nature of his work. "My
husband tells me you're a religious writer," she remarked, fixing a
pair
of beady eyes directly upon him.
"Yes, that's
basically so," he admitted.
"And quite a
revolutionary one too, I hear?" Lady Handon
added.
"Yes, I suppose
so," Timothy confirmed, nodding vaguely.
Lord Handon
smiled acquiescently and confessed to only having read one of Timothy's
books
so far, and that the latest. Yet it had
made quite an impression on him, and he was now interested to discover
whether
its author had made any progress beyond that point in the meantime.
"Yes, do tell us
what you're currently writing," Lady Handon
seconded. "Are you a deist, a
theist, an atheist, or what?"
"Well, as a matter
of fact, I'm an atheist, insofar as I reject the assumption of an
existent
deity in the Universe and the attendant concept of Divine Creation,"
Timothy blushingly confessed.
"You do?" Lady
Handon responded, on a note of subdued
alarm. "And, pray tell me, why's that?"
"Because I believe
that the Universe is fundamentally of diabolic origin and that
evolution is essentially
a struggle, as it were, from the Devil to God," the writer averred.
One or two brows were
raised in tacit incredulity with the reception of this unconventional
statement. Young Geraldine even found it
slightly amusing and smiled faintly.
"In
what way diabolic?" Lady Handon
wanted to
know.
"Diabolic insofar
as it was brought about by the formation of stars and their myriad
explosions," Timothy answered her.
"To my mind, there's nothing more infernal and hypernegative
than the stars, and, taken together, they signify the Devil for me,
purely and
simply."
"This is certainly
beyond what you wrote in 'Religious Evolution'," Lord Handon
observed, before his wife could say anything further.
"You never mentioned that there."
"No, and I believe
I've made more progress in my religious thinking these past three or
four
months, since its publication, than in the whole of the preceding
twelve
months," Timothy confessed.
There came a murmur or
two from some of the other guests and, once again, Lady Handon
interposed with further curiosity. "You say the stars should be equated
with the Devil, but what, pray, do you equate with God?" she asked. "After all, you've just told us that you
don't believe in Him."
"Quite so, I
don't." At which point Timothy sighed
softly and took a sip of the port which, until then, had remained
untouched. "What I do believe,
however, is that man is entrusted with the responsibility of creating
God, that
human evolution is essentially nothing less than a development for
bringing God
to fruition in the Universe, and thus of establishing God as the climax
to
it."
Lady Handon
raised her brows and cast her husband a correspondingly puzzled look. She had never heard anything of the sort and
couldn't very well disguise the fact. "But
how?" she asked, in an almost petulant sort of way.
"Increasingly, in
the future, through the widespread practice of Transcendental
Meditation and
the cultivation, in consequence, of superconscious
mind - in other words, the spirit," Timothy revealed.
"Transcendental Meditation?"
Geraldine repeated, still vaguely amused.
"Yes, though not in
a passive sense, reminiscent of Buddhist practices, but in a
dynamically
post-Christian sense which stresses the difference between God and the
world,
between, for want of a better term, the Holy Spirit and human spirit. One mustn't think that because one is
meditating one is tuning-in, as it were, to God, since, as I've just
contended,
God is in the making, not already there.
All one would be doing, in reality, is tuning-in to one's own
spirit. But one's own spirit shouldn't
be confused with the Holy Spirit, with God per
se, since it's
contaminated by the flesh, the senses, and therefore isn't transcendent. It is simply human spirit.
Therefore Brahman and Atman are not, strictly
speaking, one and the same. There is no tat
tvam asi,
or 'thou art that', contrary to Oriental assumptions.
Rather, the Holy Spirit is that which, as
God, will arise out of man in due course, when he has evolved to a
point where
his spirit has expanded and developed to such an extent ... that it
becomes
transcendent, and thereupon abandons the flesh to literally establish
God in
the Universe. And once God has
been established there, He will shine inwardly for ever - eternally. So man is the medium through which the future
culmination of the Universe strives to realize itself and attain to its
blissful goal. Man is the maker of God,
not vice versa. For the maker of men,
animals, plants, etc., would appear to have been the Devil, or stars,
and so
one would be quite mistaken, in my view, to speak of a divine origin to
life or
to equate God with the world. 'Out of
evil cometh good', and out of the world will come God ... as pure
spirit."
Lady Handon
had become well-nigh flabbergasted and now turned somewhat pale in the
face. "Do you seriously mean to
suggest that nature is evil?" she exclaimed, her beady eyes more
concentrated, seemingly, than ever.
"I most certainly
do, insofar as it's under sensual dominion in subconscious stupor,"
Timothy retorted. "Quite
the
opposite
of the Holy Spirit, which would be a completely spiritual
essence
in superconscious bliss."
Lawrence Gowling, who had listened patiently to the
conversation
thus far, suddenly felt a need to challenge Timothy on the nature of
God. After all, hadn't Pascal stressed the
impossibility of our having absolute knowledge of Him, and wasn't it
therefore
presumptuous of Timothy Byrne to presume he knew better?
The young writer smiled
sympathetically and took another sip of port.
"One should beware of taking everything thought by great men of
the
past too seriously," he remarked.
"For their views are often proved fallacious in the course of
time. But no, I'm not presuming absolute
knowledge of God and, in that respect, I'm
in complete
accordance with Pascal. However, the
fact that God is a spirit would be hard to refute, since, by
definition, God is
the highest we can conceive of, and there's nothing higher than pure
spirit. But that's only relative knowledge. I can say, for instance, that God will emerge
in the Universe following transcendence, but I cannot tell you for
certain what
His exact scale will be, nor how brightly He will shine, nor how
intense will
be the bliss that results from His spiritual constitution.
I cannot tell you what it would be like to
actually be in
the holy light of pure spirit, for the simple reason that I'm a
man, with a body and impure spirit, not God.
I can only speculate and say, rather theoretically, that the
experience
of ultimate being would be higher and greater than anything one could
ever hope
to know in the becoming ... as man. I
cannot have any absolute, eternal knowledge of it.
Only, at best, a diluted, temporal, transient
knowledge, such as is compatible with my earthly condition."
"Yet, presumably,
this holy light of pure spirit, or whatever, would be a pretty large
entity," Lord Handon commented, turning a
mildly
inquisitive face towards his religious guest.
"Quite
possibly, though we cannot have any idea of exactly
how large," Timothy rejoined.
"We can, however, speculate that it would be compounded of the
transcendent spirit of the entire population at the climax of
evolution, and
quite probably the entire population of human-equivalent life forms
throughout
the Universe, so that the sum total of superconscious
mind gathered together there in absolute unity would be way beyond our
comprehension. A
phenomenal cohesion of pure spirit."
"What a staggering
thought!" cried Nigel Townley, offering
his
fellow first-time guest an expression of bewilderment.
"Yes,
and this phenomenal cohesion of pure spirit would presumably constitute
the One
which has arisen from the Many," Sarah Field suggested, warming to
Timothy's thesis.
"Precisely,"
the writer confirmed. "Thus the
converging universe to the Omega Point, which Teilhard
de Chardin often speaks about in his
fascinating
books, would indeed be a fact of spiritual evolution.
Willy-nilly, the Diabolic Many are giving way
to the Divine One."
Lady Handon
frowned bitterly and snorted defiantly.
"I really cannot reconcile myself to your attitude towards the
stars and nature," she said.
"Why, is one to see the Devil in the sun every time one looks up
at
it on a fine day?"
Geraldine tittered in
frivolous response to this sceptical if not rhetorical question,
and that prompted an otherwise circumspect Sheila Johnston to do
likewise. Even Lord Handon
permitted an indulgent smile to cross his formerly impassive face.
"You might find it
less picturesque if you were transported to Venus, where the surface
temperature is reputed to be somewhere in the region of eight-hundred
degrees
Fahrenheit (800°F) and you'd be in for an extremely roasting time,"
Timothy replied, endeavouring not to flinch before Lady Handon's
stern gaze. "And, of course, the
closer you went to the sun, the hotter the temperature would get, so
that you'd
have a less complacent notion of it.
Even here on earth there are places, like the
Lord Handon
smiled defensively. "One would
think that the Universe is still quite an imperfect place, judging by
the vast
numbers of primal stars currently in existence," he said.
"Indeed,"
Timothy agreed, nodding. "And it
will continue to know imperfection until such time as the last star
collapses
and fades away in so many thousands-of-millions-of-years' time. Only when the Universe is solely the Holy
Spirit will it be perfect. In the
meantime, it will remain under the Devil's influence to some extent,
even with
the initial emergence of transcendent spirit."
"You mean, with the
climax of human evolution?" Gowling
suggested.
"Either that or with
the climax of human-equivalent evolution on some other planet or
planets
elsewhere in the Universe," Timothy smilingly rejoined.
"After all, we can't be sure that we're
the only relatively-advanced species of life in the Universe, can we? And if there are others, then they must be a
part of a converging universe to the Omega Point as well."
"What makes you so
sure that some other species, more advanced than us, hasn't already
established
transcendent spirit somewhere in the Universe?" Lady Handon
asked, offering fresh opposition to the young writer.
"Well, frankly, I
just can't believe that any other civilization elsewhere in the
Universe could
possibly have evolved to that level when we still have such a
deplorably long
way to go here," Timothy replied.
"It's too fantastic. The
theory of a converging universe would seem to suggest that,
willy-nilly, all
its higher life forms must converge together en
masse and roughly
apace, rather than at great evolutionary intervals.
Now the fact, moreover, that we haven't yet
encountered any alien civilizations, not having explored too deeply
into space,
suggests that evolution still has a long way to go before an extensive
convergence becomes manifest in the Universe.
Consequently, judging from the absence of any superior alien
visitors to
earth thus far, we needn't expect other civilizations to be greatly
ahead of
us. In all probability they'll either be
a little behind us, approximately on our own level, or a little ahead -
assuming, for the sake of argument, that any such alien civilizations,
and
hence alternative life-forms, do actually exist. Yet
I'd
be extremely surprised to learn of an
alien civilization which had already established the beginnings of God,
so to speak,
in the Universe, when it would seem that we on earth still have such a
deplorably long way to go. Somehow I
can't help but assume that any truly-advanced, superior 'people' would
already
have made themselves extensively known throughout the Universe by dint
of
their spiritual sophistication. Accordingly, I remain unflinchingly an
atheist, but an atheist with this difference: I'm all in favour of our
doing
what we can either to establish God as the Holy Spirit in the Universe
in the
future or, if some other civilization beats us to it, at least
contribute to
its growth by linking our spirit with the sum total of transcendent
spirit
already there. Thus I'm in the quite
unique position of being an atheist who's in favour of God. No small distinction!"
Lady Handon
snorted contemptuously and sought distraction in the flickering flames
of the
large open fire to her left. She wasn't
at all resigned to the writer's beliefs, nor
to his
apparent facetiousness concerning them!
But Lord Handon had a different
response.
"Yes, you're
probably onto something there," he at length opined, a reflective
expression on his darkly clean-shaven face.
"The notion of a diabolic origin and of a divine consummation to
the Universe does, I must say, possess a certain logical appeal. After all, when one recalls that this planet
was once populated by fearsome dinosaurs and other loathsome monsters,
and that
volcanoes were erupting all over the damn place, it would seem more
logical to
ascribe such a creation to the Devil than to God. Life
on
earth must have been a real hell for
the earliest men, mustn't it?"
"To be sure,
and only very gradually did it become less so, as man
evolved away from nature and thus grew less evil himself," Timothy
averred. "For a long time man was
little better than the beasts, since more given, like them, to sensual
indulgences. But gradually, with the
development of civilization, he became less sensual and more spiritual,
grew
closer to God. Yet even the most
spiritual men are partly of diabolic origin, insofar as they're of the
flesh. All they can do is aspire towards
God, not
actually be
God. For God and
nature, which includes the flesh, are two very different things, and
should
never be equated!"
Lady Handon
frowned sullenly at Timothy, while Geraldine drew attention to the
difference
between his standpoint and those who equated God with nature. Apparently, the pantheists were quite
mistaken, then?
"To my mind they're
really unconscious devil-worshippers," the writer asserted
confidently. "Anyone who equates
God with creation rather than consummation must inevitably make the
same
mistake. For nature is an entirely
sensual phenomenon, and anyone who thinks he sees God in it must be
imagining
things. If, on rare occasions, it
appears transfigured, shines, as it were, with a spiritual glow - as it
apparently did for Wordsworth on occasion - one can assume that the
mind of the
beholder has experienced an inrush of spirit and projected this
internal
transformation onto nature, thus giving rise to the delusion that it's
nature itself
which shines with 'something far more deeply interfused',
or
whatever
the quotation is. For, in
reality, nature can never be anything other than its own subconscious
self."
"Accordingly,
writers like Aldous Huxley were somewhat
mistaken to
equate it with God?" Lord Handon suggested.
"Indeed,"
Timothy opined. "Although
unquestionably a brilliant man, Huxley fell too much under the
influence of
Oriental mysticism, with its complacency in nature.
He couldn't properly distinguish between the
One and the Many, but was all-too-disposed to see the Many in the One
rather
than as the basis out of which the One would eventually emerge. He could never have equated the stars with
the Devil, still less regarded nature as the Devil's creation. To him, it was all part of the One, and the
One was compounded of the creative force behind nature, or the Ground,
the
natural realm itself, including the human, and the Clear Light of the
Void."
"Which, presumably,
is approximately equivalent to the Holy Trinity?" Lord Handon
conjectured.
"To be sure,"
Timothy conceded. "But this, I
believe, is where traditional religion, both Eastern and Western, slips
up. For, in reality, there's no such
unity but, rather, a continuum of evolution from the Diabolic Alpha to
the
Divine Omega via man. The One is the
consummation of this evolution, not a combination of 'Three in One',
like the
Christian cynosure of the Holy Trinity.
To my mind, the Creator, or the Ground, is symbolic of the Many,
whereas
the Holy Spirit, or Clear Light, symbolizes of the One.
And, in between, we have Jesus Christ, or
some such Eastern equivalent like the Buddha, who represents the human
aspiration towards God, towards Oneness.
He is a son of the Many, as it were, aspiring towards the One."
"A
son of the Devil?" Lord Handon
queried,
on a note of slightly scandalized concern.
"Inasmuch
as
we're all sons or daughters of nature and are
thus fleshy, worldly, natural," Timothy calmly responded.
"Yet Christ is
represented as a supernatural being in scripture," Lady Handon objected.
"From a theological
standpoint, that is absolutely correct," the writer admitted, blushing
slightly under pressure of her fierce gaze.
"But, not being an orthodox Christian, I don't personally take
Christ's
divinity too seriously. To me, there's
only one true divinity, and that is the pure spirit which should emerge
out of
man's spirit at the culmination of evolution.
I reject all other concepts of the supernatural, including the
ghostly. And that's why I'm an atheist,
not a believer in divinities which are presumed to exist already."
"Then what, pray,
of the resurrection of Christ?" Lady Handon
imperiously pressed him.
"I regard that as
an excellent symbol, or metaphor, for man's future destiny in spiritual
transcendence," Timothy declared.
"Don't think I'm knocking Christianity, I'm not.
If you must know, I regard it as the greatest
of the traditional, or 'axial', faiths ... to cite a term coined, I
believe, by
the philosopher Lewis Mumford. But I also believe that, so far as the more
advanced industrial nations are concerned, it has seen its best days
and is
gradually being superseded by a transcendental attitude to God, an
attitude
which should constitute the final stage of our religious evolution. Christianity has brought us to
transcendentalism, but transcendentalism will take us to God - of that
I have
no doubt!"
"Let's hope you're
right," said Nigel Townley sympathetically.
"Yes," agreed
Geraldine, to the consternation of her mother, who briefly cast her a sharp look of reproof.
"And presumably this transcendentalism to which you allude, Mr Byrne, should not be confounded with
Oriental
mysticism, but is largely a Western affair?"
"It stems from the
artificial influence of the modern city, which, in cutting us off from
nature
to a greater extent than ever before, has made the cultivation of a
predominantly spiritual approach to God possible."
No sooner had Timothy said this, however,
than he realized that he was speaking to a person who, together with
her
parents, spent most of her time in the country and therefore wasn't in
a
position to appreciate it properly. But,
since he had already spoken at some length about his religious beliefs
anyway,
there seemed little point in his refusing to continue just because
Geraldine
wasn't likely to appreciate it. And so,
with fresh resolve, he went on: "One might say that it's
post-Christian,
insofar as we're led to concentrate our religious devotion on the Third
rather
than Second so-called 'Person' of the Trinity, and so work towards
actually
bringing about the birth of the Holy Spirit in the Universe. Accordingly we're not indulging in Buddhism
or Hinduism or Mohammedanism or any other traditional religion, but in
something which is the logical outcome of them all, since a further
instance of
the converging universe from the Many to the One. Instead,
therefore,
of a number of so-called
world religions, the future will contain just one, a true world, or
global,
religion, and, being transcendental, it will prove acceptable to
everyone. Indeed, religion is hardly the
word! For we won't be
dealing
with creeds or dogmas or rites or prayers or any of the other formulae
of
traditional religious observance.
Yet inasmuch as religion has to do with the cultivation of
spirit, then
a religion of sorts is what it will assuredly be, and meditation, as a
method
of directly cultivating the spirit, will apply to it.
But its objective will be to establish God,
whereas traditional religion assumes that God already exists, which, in
my opinion,
just isn't true. All that actually
exists is the Devil, viz. the stars, and the Devil's creations, viz.
nature,
the beasts, and man. For me, the
Creator, which traditional religion upholds, is symbolic of the stars
and is
thus diabolic, not divine! 'Our Father Who art in Heaven'.... No, rather 'Our Father Who art in Hell' ..."
Lady Handon
huffed indignantly and cast her guest another withering look. "Really, Mr Byrne, how can you say such
a scandalous thing!" she exclaimed.
"Because I believe
it's true," the latter explained. "After all, we're living in an age
which is in the process of transvaluating
all values,
to cite Nietzsche, and this is simply a further instance of such a transvaluation, whereby the Father becomes
synonymous with
the Devil, in order that the term 'God' may solely be applied to the
Holy
Spirit, and all ambivalence and open-society relativity accordingly be
overcome. In reality, the concept of the
Blessed Trinity is a myth. For the
Father is decidedly cursed, whereas Christ, like all men who have
attained to a
civilized stage of evolution, is somewhere in-between - in other words both cursed and blessed, as his dual role as
banisher and redeemer at the Last Judgement adequately attests, whether
or not
one actually believes in such a judgement.
So the Father is really the Devil in disguise, an
anthropomorphic
metaphor for the creative-and-sustaining force behind the world. Now what is that if not the sun and other
such stars in the Universe? As I've said
before, if evolution is a journey from the Diabolic Alpha to the Divine
Omega,
from the Devil to God, then one can hardly regard the creative and
sustaining
force as God. On the contrary, God is,
only the Devil does."
"All this is indeed
rather revolutionary, isn't it?" Lady Handon
observed disapprovingly. "And also
rather blasphemous, I might add."
"Blasphemous?"
Timothy queried.
"Well, you do speak
of the Father as cursed, don't you?" Lady Handon
rejoined. "And your interpretation
of the Lord's Prayer would suggest that you identify 'Our Father' with the
Father
instead of with Christ, even granted the rather ambivalent terminology
involved, which may well lead some people to unthinkingly identify the
Lord's
Prayer with the Creator, and thus with anything but the god of
Christian
humanity."
"That's all too
true, and one has to accept that Western civilization is anything but
clear-cut
in its allegiance to Christ," averred Timothy, who was pleasantly
surprised to find himself at last agreeing with Lady Handon
on something. "Yet my use of the
word 'cursed' in relation to the Father is only on the understanding
that the
Father, or the Creator, stands as a symbol for the sum-total of flaming
stars
in the Universe.... Besides, as an atheist, I would be incapable of
blasphemy. For God is something I regard
as in the making, not an already-existent fact.
We have to develop our spirit until, by transcending the flesh, it becomes pure spirit and thereby
establishes the
light of God in the Universe. At present,
the Holy Spirit simply isn't there to be blasphemed, only the Devil. And I don't see how one can be accused of
blaspheming that!"
"I wasn't accusing
you of blaspheming the Devil," the hostess sternly countered. "Simply of blaspheming
God by regarding Him as cursed."
"Correction,"
said Timothy. "I was regarding the
Father as cursed, since He is symbolic of the stars for me. And the stars ... well, I could hardly be
expected to regard them, in all their infernal heat, as blessed, could
I? Quite the reverse. Only the Holy Spirit will be truly blessed,
and I can assure you that I'd be the last person on earth to blaspheme
that -
assuming one could. No, the age of
blasphemy, so to speak, is by and large a thing of the past, and let's
be
sincerely grateful for the fact! For we
are gradually coming to realize that the Universe, or at least the
world, is
becoming increasingly peopled by men who, having turned their backs on
the
Diabolic Alpha in light of a more evolved status, aspire towards the
Divine
Omega, not by men who imagine they can come into direct contact with
the Divine
Omega, or that alpha and omega are really one and the same! One can of course come into a more profound,
expansive contact with one's spirit if one bothers to cultivate it. But that's quite a different proposition, I
should think, from actually being in the Holy Spirit as pure
transcendence. One's own spirit is, at
the best of times, only potentially divine.
For it's all the time surrounded by the flesh or, rather, the
brain. Only those whose spirits develop to
a point,
in the distant future, of literally becoming transcendent ... will know
what it
means to have direct contact with the Divine Omega.
For they will actually be God."
Lady Handon
permitted herself a sharply cynical laugh, in spite of the gravity of
the
subject. "Are we therefore to
suppose, dear boy, that the spirits of these future people of your
perverse
imaginings will somehow break out of the body, or wherever it is that
spirit
reposes, and soar heavenwards, like comets or rockets?" she cried,
casting
Timothy an equally sharp look of quizzical scepticism.
In spite of his
convictions her guest was unable to prevent himself from blushing at
what
seemed like a cynically rhetorical question, especially since Geraldine
and one
or two of the others were manifestly amused by it.
"It may seem odd," he admitted,
after due deliberation, "but you could well be right in supposing
something of the kind. After all, how
else could spirit become transcendent if not by breaking free of the
brain and
gravitating towards some point in the Universe congenial to itself?"
Lady Handon
huffed disdainfully. "And from
whereabouts in the brain would this ... transcendent spirit emerge?"
she
wanted to know.
"Presumably from
that part of the psyche known as the superconscious,
in
which
it had been cultivated," Timothy averred.
"What, leaving a
hole in the skull behind?" Lady Handon
conjectured cynically.
Lord Handon
flashed his wife a reproving glance, but said nothing.
"Not
necessarily," Timothy responded, remaining calm. "Though
it
might cause the brain to blow
apart, since it would be an incredibly powerful globe of spirit - more
powerful
than virtually anything of which we can now conceive."
Lady Handon
smiled self-indulgently. She was
endeavouring to imagine what thousands of small globes of spirit
simultaneously
converging upon a central axis in the Universe would look like. Some kind of vast fireworks display in
reverse was the nearest she could get to it.
"And, presumably, when all the transcendent spirit in the
Universe
had converged upon a central axis, God would be complete, would He?"
she
frowningly concluded.
Timothy nodded his head
in wary confirmation. "But not
until then," he opined. "Which
is another reason why one can assume that, properly speaking, God
doesn't at
present exist. For even if, by some
remote chance, an alien civilization much more advanced than ours had
established transcendent spirit somewhere in the Universe, such spirit
would
only amount to a tiny fraction of the potential sum-total of pure
transcendence
which the evolving Universe was capable of producing.
In other words, it would merely constitute
the beginnings of God, not the Divine Omega in its entirety, grown to
full
maturity, so to speak, through the spiritual assimilation of the total
transcendence of every advanced civilization.
However, I incline to doubt that even one
alien
civilization elsewhere in the Universe has already attained to
definitive
salvation, and thus entered the heavenly Beyond."
Lady Handon
coughed superciliously and turned her beady eyes back towards the fire,
as
though to seek refuge in a more congenial element - one necessarily
closer to
the Diabolic Alpha.
"But what happens
to our spirit when we die?" the host asked, taking over the reins of
sceptical interrogation from his fire-struck wife.
"I mean if, as you would doubtless
agree, transcendent spirit is eternal, why shouldn't our mundane spirit
also be eternal and thus, as has been
traditionally believed,
capable of surviving bodily death?
Surely if spirit is eternal, it must continue to exist following
death?"
"I rather doubt
that," answered Timothy in an almost commiserating tone-of-voice. "For it seems to me that spirit only has
a right to eternity if it has been extensively cultivated and is
thereby able
to escape the body, not otherwise being strong enough to survive it. Now since we haven't yet evolved to a stage
of extensively cultivating the spirit, having too many bodily
obligations to
attend to, it would seem that it is destined to perish - mine, yours,
everyone's. We none of us seem to have
got to a point where spirit is strong enough for eternity."
"Not even the
saints and spiritually elect?" Lord Handon
queried, his eyebrows slightly arched in sceptical response.
"I doubt it,"
Timothy opined. "After all, they
mostly lived in an age which was at a lower stage of evolution than
ours, an
age in which men were closer to nature and had more contact with
natural things
generally. And, as far as I know, they
all died - like everyone else. Now it
has been assumed that, at death, the spirit passes into the heavenly
Beyond. But I incline to the view that,
even in the case of the more spiritually earnest individuals, it simply
expires
and thereby succumbs to that nothingness the other side of life. For if the spirit ever were to leave for the
Beyond, it seems to me that the point of death would be the last time
at which
it could do so, since it's weaker then than at any other time and
therefore
unlikely to gather sufficient energy together to be able to precipitate
itself
into Eternity. No, I incline to the view
that, at death, the spirit simply expires.
If one is ever qualified to transcend the body, it would be at a
point
in time when the spirit was most energetic, not when it was on the
point of
languishing irrevocably into death. One
would, I imagine, be in one's spiritual prime, fully conscious and
determined
to attain to the Beyond, which isn't, however, the narrow personalized
heaven of
Christian man but, rather, the climax of evolution in which, by
completely
transcending the body, man ceases to be human and becomes divine. That is my belief anyway, and you can accept
or reject it, as you please. I'm not
trying to convert anyone here to my religious position, simply
endeavouring to
offer what I consider to be a valid reinterpretation and extension of
Christian
belief in suitably contemporary terms.
For we've now got to the stage, as a society, where it's
possible to
look upon spiritual evolution not with the eyes of faith, like our
Christian
forebears, but with the eyes of scientific knowledge.
The age of faith is, fortunately or
unfortunately, a thing of the past, rendered necessary in its time by
the
egocentric stage of evolution to which dualistic man had progressed. Now that we're in the post-egocentric or
transcendental stage of evolution, however, we can regard spiritual
issues with
a transpersonally factual eye and thereby
aspire to
objective truth. We needn't consider
ourselves particularly unfortunate on that account."
There was a rustle of
clothing and a few embarrassed coughs from
amongst the
recipients of Timothy's informal lecture, followed by an uneasy silence
in
which baffled or sceptical looks were exchanged. Only
Nigel
Townley
on the writer's left and Sarah Field on his right conveyed an
impression of
having been impressed by it, since they gently smiled in his direction
and
regarded him with respectful eyes.
However, the host and hostess appeared somewhat disconcerted,
especially
the latter, whose eyes smouldered with resentment in the shadow of the
flickering flames. But nothing further
was said or asked to provoke Timothy into continuing an exposition of
his
current religious freethinking. And so,
before long, the conversation turned elsewhere, giving some of the
other guests
an opportunity to reveal their deeper selves, however right or wrong
those
selves might happen to be!
CHAPTER
THREE
Later
that
afternoon Lord Handon,
desiring as much to show off his house as to entertain his guests in a
relatively educative manner, took those of them who hadn't set foot in
it
before on a brief tour of inspection, starting with the ground floor
and
working up to the bedrooms in which each of them had been allocated a
bed for
the night. Sarah Field expressed her
delight in and amazement at what the host had in store for them,
whereas
Timothy Byrne, though intrigued by the scale of everything, remained
somewhat
cooler and more objectively detached than the others, as though in an
effort
not to be too impressed by anything, least of all by its scale or
amount.
It was in the library,
for instance, that he acquired his first real glimpse of an
aristocratic norm
where books were concerned - a glimpse, alas, which did little but
confirm him
in his low opinion of aristocratic libraries generally!
Stretching some thirty yards along the length
of an entire wall and reaching to a height of about ten feet from the
floor,
the shelves of this particular library were crammed full of rather
cumbersome-looking leather-backed tomes of ancient lineage, which had
doubtless
been handed down from generation to generation of the Handon
family line. There must have been
upwards of 20,000 books there, most of which had probably never been
read, at
least not by the present owner, the 4th Viscount Handon. They had probably just stood there for
centuries, gathering dust. Only a tiny
fraction of them, at best, would have had their pages turned and
perused in a
thoroughly curious manner.... Though quite a
number may well
have served a brief reference purpose which the owner felt it incumbent
upon
himself to engage in from time to time.
Indeed, many of them were so large, so weighty and lengthy, that
it was
inconceivable they could possibly serve any other purpose than one of
reference, since, even with all the time in the world, such tomes would
have
taken months, if not years, to peruse individually.
For the most part, they were simply
decorative possessions which the viscount had considered it expedient
to
hold-on to for family honour and to satisfy the scholarly traditions of
his
class - extremely expensive possessions which would fetch a tidy sum
from any
prospective buyer, if ever he or any of his descendants decided to sell.
Oh, yes!
And as Timothy scanned the tightly packed
shelves of cumbersome tomes, he realized that their purchase could run
into
hundreds-of-thousands of pounds. But
that wasn't something by which he intended to be unduly impressed. On the contrary, he needed to keep his
customary attitude to the existence of such collections in mind - an
attitude
which, rather than being impressed by them, tended towards their
condemnation
on grounds of excessive materialism. As
the Biblical proverb had it: 'Easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a
needle than for a rich man to enter the
No, it was perfectly
obvious that they were not the ears for his mouth, to paraphrase
Nietzsche,
but, given their stately circumstances, would either be offended by
what he
said, as in the case of Lady Pamela, or somewhat perplexed by it, as in
the
case of the more benign Lord Handon, who
nevertheless
endeavoured, in his capacity of host, to remain as receptive as
possible. Still, one could understand the
human
aspirations in the face of nature which had led to the building of
large
country houses like Rothermore. Rather than risk being dwarfed by the
surrounding countryside, the aristocracy had sought to tame and
dominate it as
best they could, and the erection of the largest possible houses had
gone some
way towards satisfying that end. After
all, even the ancient aristocracy were human beings, not animals, and
consequently they reflected human aspirations towards the Divine Omega,
no
matter how crudely or materialistically.
Even the viscount's great-great-great-grandfather would have had
a
spirit of sorts and found it desirable to cultivate that spirit to at
least
some extent, even if only to the rather limited extent of collecting
thousands
of cumbersome books and filling his house with Greek or Roman statuary. For, as the library amply
demonstrated, there was no shortage of classical sculpture on display,
though
most of it was undoubtedly derivative.
In fact, it was difficult not to stumble against various of the
statues,
statuettes, and busts, as one gingerly wound one's way between the
tables and
chairs liberally scattered along the length of Lord Handon's
library, as though in anticipation of a whole tribe of avid readers. Doubtless a certain horror
vacui had possessed the original
furnisher of this room,
which duly resulted in its becoming virtually crammed with possessions,
both
aesthetic and utilitarian. And the
current owner had not rebelled against the fashion of his ancestors
but, if the
comparative newness of one or two of the chairs and tables was any
indication,
had succumbed to it with a few materialistic additions of his own! Well, judging by the amount of furniture
already in the room, it was pretty obvious that Lord Handon
wouldn't be able to add much else to it in future, not unless he either
sold
off most of what was already there or set about filling up the interior
space
of certain other rooms - assuming, of course, that they still had any
such
space left to fill. As yet, Timothy had
only seen a couple of the downstairs rooms, so he wasn't really in a
position
to judge. But what he had seen was more
than enough to make him pessimistic about the rest of the house,
bathrooms and
toilets not excepted!
Yet, by an ironic
paradox, it could also be claimed that this urge to collect and fill
one's
rooms with expensive possessions was a further indication of
aristocratic man's
desire not to be dwarfed or smothered by nature, but to extend
civilization to
the extent he could. The regrettable
thing, however, was that he could only extend it, for the most part, in
materialistic terms, not in terms, significant of the spiritual, which
stood at
the furthest remove from sensuous nature.
With him, it was more a case of endeavouring to protect oneself
against
a greater evil with the aid of a lesser good.
Whereas it was increasingly becoming the tendency of modern man
to
protect himself against a lesser good with the aid of a greater good,
which is
to say, to bring forward the direct cultivation of the spirit through
meditation at the expense of its indirect cultivation through culture. No small distinction! But
aristocratic
man, reflected Timothy,
hadn't really been in a position to do any such thing, and so the
indirect
cultivation of the spirit through culture was, as a rule, the best that
could
be done.
And not generally the
most elevated culture either, if Lord Handon's
library was anything by which to judge!
One searched in vain, among the numerous sculptures on display,
for
anything with a direct bearing on Christianity.
Not a single statue, statuette, or bust of a senior Church
dignitary,
not even of a pope or an archbishop, and no reproductions of saints or
evangelists either. Except for some
busts dedicated to the memory of various members of the Handon
line, the entire collection revolved around classical antiquity, with
reproductions of Roman emperors, Graeco-Roman
deities,
and
one or two Greek heroes, like Hercules and
Yet neither, it
appeared, would the writings of the great Christian mystics have
appealed to
this family. For the
bookshelves were mainly dedicated to the pagan authors of classical
antiquity,
especially the Romans, who figured prominently on the lower shelves. Possibly everything ever written and
preserved for posterity by Sulla, Cicero, Tetullian,
Caesar,
Scipio,
Horace, Senneca, Juvenal, Catullus, Virgil, Terence, and Pliny was to be
found there,
both in the original Latin and in subsequent English, French, and
German
translations, reminiscent of the sort of library favoured by that great
sixteenth-century humanist, Michel de Montaigne. By craning one's neck up to the top two
shelves at the far end of the library, it was just possible to discern
a few
large depressing-looking bibles, again in various tongues, but the eye
soon
encountered the beginnings of a series of books written not by the
Church
Fathers, as one might vaguely have expected, but by medieval
scholastics of a
classical turn-of-mind, whose interest in contemporary scientific
endeavour
extended to a commentary on the Greek philosophers, and whose works now
sedately reposed beside the major philosophical achievements of Plato
and
Aristotle. Farther along that same shelf
the subject of Greek philosophy was superseded by a series of large
tomes on
alchemy, among them a number by Paracelsus, and beneath these the eye
discerned
the complete plays of Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille,
and
Molière in rather old but evidently
valuable
editions - probably the first or very nearly.
Apart from a number of important literary figures such as
Chaucer,
Dante, Montaigne, Boccaccio,
Rabelais,
Petrach, Cevantes,
Milton,
Byron,
and Goethe, the greater part of the remaining shelves was
taken-up with histories, memoirs, biographies, letters, philosophies,
and books
on painting, architecture, graphics, landscape gardening, and sculpture. In fact, apart from a little modern history,
the only contribution the twentieth century seemed to make to Lord Handon's library was in the realm of aesthetics,
notably
through art books dealing with classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Judging by the nature of the house itself,
one might have thought the Baroque would figure prominently. But, try as he might, Timothy could discern
no more than three works dedicated to that stage of aesthetic
evolution, and
they were decidedly pre-war, suggesting acquisition by the viscount's
father or
grandfather rather than by the current owner himself.
Thus apart from the aforementioned histories
and studies in classical and renaissance aesthetics, the crisp spines
and
bright titles of which betrayed comparatively recent purchase, the
great
majority of the books on display appeared to have been inherited and
retained
in aristocratic tradition. Unless by
some chance Lord Handon had a second
library
elsewhere, it looked as though this collection was broadly
representative of
his intellectual tastes - tastes which completely excluded the modern! For even the newer books in it had been
written in the twentieth century about
pre-twentieth century activity, like the studies in classical art. As regards modern art, a
complete blank. And as regards
modern literature, the nearest one came to it appeared to be
half-a-dozen
novels by Disraeli and a couple by Lytton! Really, Timothy could hardly believe his
eyes, as he frantically scanned the shelves in search of
twentieth-century
life. Not even a Proust
or a Gide or a Mann.
Nothing! So far as this library
went, the twentieth century didn't exist.
Evidently, Lord Handon had little
use for
it. Or would it be nearer the mark to
say that it had little use for him?
It wasn't exactly a
question one could ask there and then, not, anyway, while the man in
question
was so fervently engaged in explaining to both Sarah Field and Nigel Townley how his great-grandfather had acquired
the Venus
statuette in imitation of Phidias by an
unknown Roman
sculptor whilst serving as English ambassador to Italy at the time of
its
discovery. A quite shapely statuette it
was too, but terribly nude and pagan! It
would have been of more interest to Timothy, just then, had someone
inquired
how the family had come by the worn edition of the Marquis de Sade's 120
Jours de Sodom,
which reposed, beside a number of the master's other novels, on a shelf
just to
the left of where he was now standing, slightly apart from the small
group of
admiring statuette-gazers. At least de Sade, for all his moral faults, had the virtue
of seeing
the criminality in nature at close range, so to speak, and in not
pretending
that it was really something else. There
was even a dash of the saint about him, albeit in a paradoxically
negative kind
of way. For rather than turning towards
God and the spiritual with love, like a genuine saint, de Sade
had elected to turn against nature and the sensual with contempt, and
thereby
set about denigrating it in the manner best known to posterity. Hardly surprising, therefore, that he was
condemned as a criminal and regarded as an eccentric in an age of Rousseauesque fervour for nature
and Wordsworthian complacency in
nature. His hatred of nature, and the
rather extreme
manifestation it was increasingly to take, could hardly be described,
under the
prevailing circumstances, as trendy. Yet
it served as an example of sorts to such negatively inclined 'saints',
or
anti-saints, as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Huysmans, who were to bring the anti-natural
tradition of
decadent writings to a much more refined pass later in the century. But de Sade, it
appeared, was the only anti-saint Lord Handon's
library contained, whether or not its current owner appreciated the
fact. In all probability, thought Timothy,
as he
followed his fellow-guests past the Venus statuette and on towards the
exit, the
novels by that notorious French nobleman had mouldered on their shelf
since
virtually the time of their purchase.
The current viscount had probably not even opened them. Or, if perchance he had, he probably shut
them again pretty quickly, fearing contamination!
They passed out of the
library and were, in due course, introduced to most of the other rooms,
including a large billiards room in which a couple of lush green
felt-topped
tables, one full-size and the other small, stood naked but for a cue
resting on
each. Apparently billiards and snooker
were among the host's favourite pastimes, which he sometimes played
with
himself, but more often with friends of the family who came-in from
nearby
country houses to do noble battle with him.
Neither of the two male
guests accompanying him on this particular tour of inspection, however,
could
admit to being regular practitioners of either game, though Townley
confessed to having played a great deal of snooker in his youth - a
confession
which appeared to endow him with a certain temporary distinction over
the
others in Lord Handon's eyes.
Yet, for Timothy, the
most interesting aspect of the billiards room was the arrangement of
Ionic
pilasters which stretched the length of the walls at wide though
regular intervals,
endowing the setting with a restrained classical elegance.
Being fluted, they took on a symbolically
feminine character that sharply contrasted with the masculinity of the
bare,
white Doric columns which stood at salient points in the room, more
suggestive
of the interior of a Greek temple than of anything recreational. In fact, there was even space here for a few
statues of Greek athletes, and the wall nearest the full-size table had
two
curved niches in it, at a distance of some four yards apart, each of
which
contained a brightly-painted Greek vase of the type which Timothy must
have
seen hundreds of photos of, during his pictorial investigations in the
local
library, but had only once before beheld in the flesh, so to speak, and
then in
the British Museum. Was this spectacle
any better or worse, he wondered?
Curiously, he thought worse. For
he had grown so accustomed to photographic reproductions of works of
art ...
that he had come to value the reproduction above the original
production. Lord Handon
was
perfectly entitled to his vases, as to his sculptures, but he, Timothy
Byrne,
wouldn't have wanted them, not even if they were offered to him
free-of-charge. He preferred the
spiritualization of the material object to the material object itself,
and was
therefore more at home with photos.
These Greek vases were of course beautiful, but they were even
more
beautiful, to Timothy's way of thinking, as colour reproductions in
some choice
book on the subject. The actual object was
somehow disappointing, all too palpably there. He preferred his culture at a Platonic
remove, as it were, from real culture, raised above materialism through
spiritual sublimation. All these
sculptures and ceramics which Lord Handon
possessed
and evidently had need of, to fill his immense house, would have been
raised to
a higher level, it seemed to him, in photographic reproduction. Rather than floundering about amidst bodies,
as one did here, one would be contemplating their abstracted spirit, at
a safe
remove from their physical presence. And
one would be experiencing a higher level of culture - a level made
possible
thanks to the existence of photography.
Yes, how logical
evolution was! The further one evolved,
the more spiritual one became.
Eventually one would even dispense with photographic
reproductions. But not
for a while yet,
least of all within the foreseeable future.
The twenty-first century would doubtless
continue to amass reproductions of the materialistic culture
appertaining to an
earlier stage of civilized evolution, thereby indirectly furthering the
cause
of its own spiritual culture. And
Timothy would continue to derive more pleasure from the latter than
from the
former - of that he assured himself. In
fact, so much so that his facial expression, as he stood no more than a
few
feet from the nearest Greek vase, must have communicated something of
the
disdain he was feeling for the object to its owner, who casually
remarked, by
way of apology, that it was a rather second-rate, first-century item
purchased
for a modest sum by his grandfather, some decades ago.
Slightly taken aback by the host's unexpected
intervention, and a little ashamed of himself
for
having unwittingly betrayed his feelings on the matter, Timothy blushed
faintly
and then burst into a forgiving smile.
He could hardly reveal to the viscount what had really been on
his mind!
And so, following their
brief but passably educative tour of Rothermore
House, the three first-time guests were led back to the large
drawing-room,
where the rest of the gathering was still assembled, and thereupon
encouraged
to have another drink, with the aged butler duly officiating. Dinner, they were informed, would commence at
seven-thirty sharp, whether or not the remaining two invitees had
arrived. In the meantime, they were to
relax and simply
get to know one another better. Which is
what now proceeded to happen ... in spite of their differences. Even the drawing-room had certain lessons to
teach, and Timothy, not least, was avid to learn what he could from it!
CHAPTER
FOUR
To
Timothy's
subsequent satisfaction, the long dinner table
accommodated the seven guests and three members of the Handon
family quite comfortably, leaving ample elbow-room to either side. At the head of it sat Lord Handon, whilst on either
side of him, to
left and right along the table's length, sat Sarah and Timothy,
the one
directly opposite the other. Next to
Timothy was Sheila Johnston, the Scotch pianist, whilst opposite her
the
architect Nigel Townley eagerly spooned
into his
helping of duck soup. Beside him sat
young Geraldine Handon, who looked
directly across,
whenever she lifted her bright-blue eyes, at the moustached face of
"And how are things
getting along at the museum?" Lady Handon
inquired of the portly gentleman to her right.
"Oh, quite well on
the whole, I'm delighted to report," O'Donnell replied.
"We're getting more visitors by the
day."
His hostess seemed
pleased by this response and cast her husband, who happened to have an
eye
cocked in their direction, a complacent glance.
"Young or old?" she asked.
"Oh, mostly schoolkids," O'Donnell obliged, momentarily
desisting
from the avid consumption of his duck soup.
"Really? And are they very noisy?"
The portly gentleman
chuckled softly. "Not as a rule,
thank goodness," he confessed.
"We try to discourage speaking as much as possible, which, in
the
circumstances, is rather ironic really."
Lady Handon
smiled knowingly and cast her husband a matching glance, to which he
duly
responded with a short, sharp laugh.
"Perhaps we ought to enlighten those of our guests who haven't
heard about Mr O'Donnell's museum," he suggested, preparatory to
imbibing
a steady spoonful of soup.
"Yes, do please
tell us what all this is about," Sheila Johnston politely requested of
him.
The portly gentleman cleared
his throat with a soft though evidently ironic cough and smiled
esoterically
upon the host, who duly said: "Well, as you will no doubt be surprised
and
delighted to hear, Mr O'Donnell is principal director of the world's
first
voice museum."
"Voice museum?"
Sheila echoed, visibly startled by this unusual information.
"Quite,"
confirmed the principal director with a gentle nod.
"It is a rather novel concept, I'll
admit. But one which, in my opinion, was
long overdue."
"As would seem to
be borne out by the growing curiosity it is apparently exciting from
the
public," Lady Handon commented.
"But what exactly is
this voice museum?" Sheila pursued, showing Scotch determination to get
to
the bottom of the matter. She looked
searchingly at Mr O'Donnell, but it was Lord Handon
who elected to reply with: "Simply an institution in
"Though some people
like to re-enter the booth a number of times in order to listen to the
same
voice over and over again," O'Donnell remarked, a touch petulantly.
"And then in spite
of the fact that they'll only hear the same recording as before," Lord Handon rejoined sympathetically.
The principal director
nodded his curly-haired head.
"Quite," he confirmed.
"Though, in the case of voices like Marilyn Monroe's and Greta Garbo's, you can quite understand it."
General amusement
prevailed amongst the other guests, with the reception of this remark.
"You mean to say
you preserve the voices of famous film stars there?" exclaimed Sarah on
a
note of gratified incredulity.
"Not only of film
stars but of the famous in general," O'Donnell declared, before noisily
swallowing his last spoonful of soup.
"We have quite a large room also dedicated to the voices of
famous
writers, composers, artists, politicians, sportsmen, war heroes, and so
on. And we shall shortly be opening a
smaller room upstairs exclusively dedicated to the voices of infamous
persons,
including the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin."
"Something
to
rival
the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Toussaud's,"
Gowling suggested, smirking ironically.
"Quite
possibly," O'Donnell conceded.
"But such specific voices, for which the young queue like
rush-hour
commuters, are only a single aspect of the museum's facilities or,
rather, exhibits. There
are
other
rooms in which anonymous voices may be heard remarking on some
particular
thing - one on the ground floor, for instance, exclusively dedicated to
regional dialects of the British people, where the visitor can sample
examples
of the thickest Geordie, the highest Highland, the softest Scouse,
the strongest Swansea, the broadest Mancunian,
or
what
have you. Then appended to this
room is another, smaller one in which the emphasis is on class rather
than
simply regional differences, and where the visitor can sample anything
from the
most plebeian cockney to the most patrician Oxbridge.
An ear-opener if ever there was one! For
you're
made comprehensively aware, if you
take full advantage of our facilities, as to just how wide the range of
speech
variation actually is between the various classes, and of how many
classes
there in fact are throughout the length and breadth of the country. Yet that room is merely an appendage to the
dialect room, which covers a much wider range of tone."
At this point there
issued from the assembled guests a mixture of surprise and amusement,
astonishment and incredulity. Timothy
Byrne, in particular, was quite astonished by these revelations,
and inquired of the man responsible for them why it was necessary to
collect
and exhibit such voices?
"My dear
chap," Lord Handon interposed, deputizing
for
the hard-pressed O'Donnell, "it's simply the function of a museum to
preserve a record of a given aspect of life, culture, society, or
whatever, and
our museum is no exception. Here, for
future
generations no less than contemporary ones, is a record, well-stocked
and
equally well-preserved, of the twentieth-century human voice in all or
most of
its several manifestations. For
virtually the first time in history, we are enabled, by our technology,
to
preserve a record of that most elusive of things, the human voice, and
that's
precisely what the museum does."
"Yes, and not only
with regard to the British voice," O'Donnell confirmed, "but also
with regard to just about every other national voice in the world, not
to
mention, in a majority of cases, the dialect and class divisions
thereof."
Timothy was virtually
thunderstruck, and so, too, were most of the other guests, despite the
distraction of dinner - the servants meanwhile having removed the empty
soup
dishes and brought in the main course, which included roast chicken and
assorted vegetables, these latter being brought up to the table
separately in
Sevres china and deposited at regular intervals along its ample length.
"For not only does
the museum possess a British room," O'Donnell continued, ignoring the toing-and-froing of the busy servants, "but it
also
possesses European, Asian, North American, South American, African, and
Australasian rooms, in which examples of the greatest diversity are to
be
found."
"Especially in the
European and Asian rooms, where the entire gamut of major national
languages is
represented," Lady Handon remarked,
putting
aside, for the moment, her preoccupation with food.
"In the European room one can listen to
anything from Portuguese and Spanish to Greek and Russian, whilst in
the Asian
room one can go from Bengali to Cantonese or from Hindustani to
Japanese all
within the space of a few minutes."
"Provided, of
course, that the booths aren't in excessive demand," O'Donnell
pedantically rejoined, helping himself to a generous portion of
Brussels
sprouts from a dish passed to him by the hostess. "Otherwise
one
may have to stand in the
queue for several minutes."
Nigel Townley proffered his most understanding smile
and
admitted, in a light-hearted vein, that it all sounded rather fun. Indeed, he was surprised, he confessed, that
this voice museum thing was a British and not an American invention,
since the
Americans were usually quick, not to say keen, to exploit new
possibilities,
and already possessed more than a few museums of a decidedly unique
character,
including, he recalled, a museum dedicated exclusively to nuts.
"Well, as a matter
of fact, my father was American,” O’Donnell admitted with a wry smile. "Though my mother was Asian and I was
born and raised here. So perhaps there's
a degree of American initiative behind the
Timothy smiled
esoterically upon the reception of this eulogistic information and cast
their
host a deferential glance, before commenting: "So now, should we ever
be
invaded by aliens from outer space, we're in possession of a building
where an
investigation of the extraordinary variety of human languages and
accents can
be carried out on-the-spot, and presumably free-of-charge - not that
aliens
would care to pay, of course."
Fifty pence for old-age
pensioners
and schoolkids," the principal director
revealed, "but £3.50p for everyone else, with the possible exception
of,
ah, aliens from outer space, who may not
have the
correct change," he added facetiously, for Timothy's benefit. "Nevertheless, any visitors to our
planet would certainly learn a thing or two about the human voice from
our
museum, assuming they weren't smart enough to go straight back from
where they
had come! Though I
need hardly remind you that it wasn't specifically designed to satisfy
the
anthropological curiosity of aliens, stupid or otherwise, but the vocal
curiosity of human beings, both now and in the future."
"Indeed," Lady
Handon confirmed, waving away the servant
who was
about to pour some red wine into her glass and motioning for sherry
instead. "And one can quite imagine
a time, you know, when people will be as interested to learn how
mankind spoke
in the twentieth century ... as we're now interested to discover how
they wrote
or built or dressed or whatever in the fifteenth century.
Time will add a new dimension, a certain
historical charm, to the recordings currently on track there. And, of course, the coming centuries should
provide us with fresh recordings - possibly even a room dedicated to
the voices
of aliens, Mr Byrne. After all, there's
no reason why we should freeze the museum's exhibits at the present
stage of
lingual evolution or reality, is there?
We can always add new floors to the top one."
"Quite,"
O'Donnell agreed, while crushing a delicious piece of roast chicken
between his
gold-plated molars. "Or even extend
the museum down deeper into the earth," he added, as an afterthought.
"Is the visitor
told anything about what he's likely to hear in whichever soundproofed
booth he
happens to enter?" asked Irene Myers, fixing an inquisitive gaze on the
face opposite.
"Oh yes,"
O'Donnell replied with alacrity, a piece of tender chicken transfixed
on the
sharp prongs of his silver-plated fork.
"There's a large white plastic plaque on each of the booths
bearing,
in crisp black print, information about the voice recording inside. But most people don't bother to read them,
partly, I suspect, through laziness, though also because quite a lot
can be
spoken within two minutes and, since a majority of the recordings last
that
long, the plaque can become rather prolix and tedious to read. So most people, especially the slow readers,
tend to studiously ignore it, so to speak, and take pot-luck with
whatever the
recordings contain. However, largely as
an ethical gesture, we find it expedient to provide details of the
recordings
in order to nominally preclude criticism from those who might otherwise
be in
some doubt as to their moral integrity
and consequently inclined to suppose they contained scurrilous or
obscene language,
which, of course, they most certainly do not!"
Lord Handon
found O'Donnell's explanation highly amusing and duly infected the rest
of the
table and even the elderly butler, who was still officiating with the
drinks
and generally pottering about the diners in his rather genteel and
overly
deferential manner, as though dealing with hot-house plants. It was now, as he received an extra drop of Cockburns port from the old bugger's unsteady
hands, that
Timothy realized he was at least partly deaf.
For he wore a tiny hearing-aid clipped to his left ear, and this
in some
measure sufficed to explain the rather strange proceedings in the
drawing-room
earlier, both in terms of Lord Handon's
loud commands
and of the butler's rather close proximity to them all in the region of
the
wine cabinet. Presumably, if the old man
was going deaf, he couldn't be allowed to stray very far from the scene
of
alcohol consumption, but had to remain permanently on duty there, like
the proverbial
sentry at his post. There seemed little
risk, to judge by the loudness of the viscount's orders, of his
overhearing
much anyway, and this further realization came as a slight relief to
Timothy,
who was unused to talking in the proximity of servants.
"Unfortunately
we've received a number of critical, not to say abusive, letters from
various
elderly members of the public who considered what they heard, in
certain
booths, to be of dubious propriety," continued the principal director,
as
soon as things had quietened down again.
"However, you can't please everyone, and I'm fairly convinced
that
such people would find something else to grumble about if not that."
"Like, presumably,
the brevity of each of the recordings, or the volume at which they're
played,
or the size of the booths, or the length of the queue, or something of
that
order, I should imagine," Geraldine suggested, before looking across
her
shoulder at the portly figure on her left.
"Quite so,"
O'Donnell confirmed, with an abrupt and evidently peeved nod of his
curly-haired head thrown-in for good measure.
"Yet I've no cause to endorse the criticism of dubious propriety
myself, which, not altogether surprisingly, has mostly been levelled at
the
booths of the famous, particularly the writers and film stars, while
those of
the anonymous French, Italian, and Greek voices exhibited in the
European room
have borne the brunt of the remainder of such criticisms.
These latter recordings would appear to be
obscene to some people simply because they're foreign and seemingly
unintelligible,
whereas with the former recordings ... well, perhaps it's just the
tone-of-voice adopted or the way the words are handled ... that
aggravates the
ageing sensibilities of my foremost critics.
Still, one can hardly expect Marilyn Monroe or Greta Garbo
to sound like sexless machines, can one?
And as for Henry Miller ... well, his mere inclusion in the
museum is
evidently sufficient grounds for hostility from some visitors, even
though what
he says is entirely restricted to himself
and
completely devoid of sexual epithets."
There was a faint ripple
of laughter around the table at this remark, and Geraldine, although by
no
means the most prudish of young females, saw fit to blush.
Lady Handon merely
nodded her head and then sipped daintily at the sherry in her bony hand. She was one of those who, albeit secretly,
opposed the inclusion of Henry Miller herself.
Timothy, by contrast, was quite delighted with the mention of
it, and
inquired of the director what other writers' voices were to be heard
there.
"Oh, quite a
number," came his confident reply.
"For example, Aldous Huxley, Ezra
Pound,
G.B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot,
Robert
Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess
- a few
more of that sort. We only exhibit the
voices of those who are dead, as a rule, though we have recordings of
various
important authors who are still alive in stock, so to speak, for future
use. Also several
tapes of authors - as, indeed, of other artists and famous people in
general -
who, although dead, are kept in reserve, pending a rise in their
reputations. Rather than being a
'dead' museum, where the
same exhibits are on display year after dreary year, the Metropolitan
Voice
Museum, as it's officially called, is very much a 'living' one, with
regular
changes or variations in the exhibition material. So
you're
not guaranteed of hearing T.S.
Eliot again, assuming you went back to the museum after a couple of
years
expecting to do so. And even if his
voice was still there, you're not guaranteed of hearing it say exactly
the same
thing as before. I like to ensure that
there's sufficient recorded material in stock to enable us to vary the
programme from time to time. That way
nobody gets bored, and there's always some fresh bait, as it were, to
entice
people back to the museum.... In point of fact, I'm seriously
considering
having the recorded programme we currently have of Aldous
Huxley on exhibition replaced by a less philosophical and possibly more
autobiographical one, since I recently received a highly critical
letter from a
senior churchman accusing the museum of propagating certain orientally-inspired
mystical views prejudicial to the Christian faith.
It seems the good man was less than happy
with, amongst other things, the term 'Clear Light of the Void', and
would have
preferred Huxley to speak in terms closer to the Western soul, such as
the Holy
Ghost."
Timothy smiled
appreciatively at O'Donnell before swallowing the thoroughly chewed
remains of
his last piece of roast chicken. "I
think he may well have a point there," he opined, when his throat was
clear again.
"Yes, well, I may
replace the current orientally-biased
recording with
a less 'prejudicial' one in due course," O'Donnell sighed, "and
thereupon run the risk of adverse criticism from someone who would
prefer
Huxley to be represented by his mystical views." At
which
point the principal director of the
world's only voice museum heartily cleared his throat and gulped down a
welcome
mouthful of sherry. It appeared that he
was resigned to anything and everything the public might throw at him!
"Presumably in
changing the current recording, you would have to change the
information plaque
on the outside of the booth as well?" Nigel Townley
pedantically conjectured.
"Naturally,"
O'Donnell confirmed. "We could
hardly allow those visitors who bother to read them to be misled. It would therefore be necessary to have a new
plaque printed."
To everyone's surprise,
Sheila Johnston's voice suddenly exploded into a sharp burst of
high-pitched
laughter. "I must confess to
finding it rather difficult to visualize these transparent booths, with
their
buttons and plaques and all the rest of it," she declared in her soft
Scotch accent. "Are they all
arranged like soldiers on parade, or what?"
"Mostly grouped
together in rows of about 10-20 at a time," O'Donnell rejoined over the
intervening arm of a servant, who was busily removing empty vegetable
dishes
from the table. "But, really, you'd
have to see the museum for yourself, to get a proper impression of
things and
..."
"A thing that we
hope you'll all do quite soon, in any case," Lord Handon
interposed. "And
not only as visitors. Part of the
reason for my having you here is to invite you to participate in the
museum
indirectly, that's to say, through the
medium of a
voice recording. As you're all
highly-distinguished young members of your respective professions, it
seems not
unlikely that one day you'll be eligible for inclusion in the museum's
catalogue
of famous people. So a recording or two
of each of you now, at this stage in your respective careers, would not
be
inappropriate, in my opinion."
"And later on, we
may wish to record you again," said O'Donnell, his sherry-wet lips
curved
into a gentle smile.
There issued a number of
gasps and raised brows from the other guests, who were completely
astounded by
the prospect of being included in the museum's arsenal of tapes.
"How come you
didn't mention this the last time we were here, Lord Joe," complained
Lawrence Gowling, speaking principally for
himself and Miss Johnston.
"Oh, partly because
I hadn't then discussed the possibility with Mr O'Donnell and felt that
it was
safer to wait until he agreed to your inclusion before putting the
invitation
to you," the viscount revealed, smiling.
"He won't allow just anyone with a name in the arts to record
for
him, you know. Only the best are chosen,
and after long and arduous discussion, we came to the conclusion that
you're
all eminently qualified for the honour, if I may so term it, of
indirectly
participating in the museum's catalogue of illustrious names."
"How
flattering!" cried Sarah, clapping her hands together in childish delight. "And do
you intend us all to record here, there, or what?"
"Preferably in the
recording-room on the top floor of our Piccadilly headquarters," the
director answered, craning his neck round to the right, in order to
address the
opera singer in person. "We would
require less than an hour of your time to get your voice on tape in a
suitably-polished and correct manner.
All you need do is to speak slowly and distinctly about either
yourself
or your professional activity for about fifteen-twenty minutes, so as
to give
us sufficient material for several short exhibits ... should we wish to
vary
the subject-matter from time to time.
And in about ten or twelve years' time, you can all come back to
the
recording-room again to advertise your more mature voices for an
alternative
airing." He smiled benignly on the
talented occupants of the table, before helping himself to another
mouthful of
sherry.
"Well, do we have
your consent?" Lord Handon asked, throwing
his
head back the better to scan the Voice Museum's potential prey.
"Frankly, it all
sounds a trifle bananas to me," Townley
averred. "But since you appear so
serious about it, I shall have to consent."
"Me too,"
Sheila agreed half-heartedly.
And one by one the
others - Irene, Gowling, Sarah, and
Timothy - each
volunteered to offer their voices, so to speak, to the museum. There wasn't really any valid reason not to,
especially in light of its appeal to one's professional vanity.
"Excellent!"
declared Lord Handon, with the facial
self-satisfaction of one who has just pulled off some lucrative
business deal
clearly in evidence. "I knew we
could count on you all! And, by the way,
Mr O'Donnell will amply remunerate you for your services."
"To the sum of
£1,000 each," the director confirmed with his customary alacrity.
Sheila Johnston raised
her dark eyebrows in a show of horrified surprise.
"Oh, but you needn't do that!" she
objected, speaking on her own behalf, but unconsciously including the
others as
well.
"I insist,"
the director quite firmly rejoined.
"It's our policy. And,
besides, it will cover your travelling expenses."
Clearly, Miss Johnston,
despite O'Donnell's little joke, had no option but to accept whatever
payment
her services were due. And the same
applied to the rest of Lord Handon's
guests, who sat
in a kind of dream while the servants cleared away the dinner plates,
preparatory to bringing in the third course, which, to everyone's
delight, took
the impressive form of apple crumble with Devonshire cream. It was at this more advanced stage in the
proceedings, curiously, that the viscount requested the substitution of
candle
light for electric light by summoning the services of a tall servant,
who, with
cigarette-lighter in hand, lit the six tapers on the two candelabra
before
switching off the light of the chandelier.
Not surprisingly, the
sudden transformation in the room's lighting caused quite a stir among
the
guests who, with the exceptions of Gowling
and
Sheila, had never experienced any such arrangement before.
Sarah regarded it as a transformation for the
better, whereas Timothy found himself reflecting on his preference for
electric
light. Indeed, he always made a point of
preferring the artificial to the natural on principle these days,
regarding it
as indicative of a higher and therefore less evil stage of evolution. The spectacle of the six candle flames
flickering in front of his port-drowsed eyes had a slightly depressing
effect
on him, making him conscious of what he took to be the close proximity
of the
Infernal, even if it was controlled and limited to a given, rather
innocuous
sphere of influence. Somehow he couldn't
avoid the connotation of flame with evil, or of the diabolic with the
sun. It was as if a tiny piece of the sun
had been
transported to the dining-room and placed on the wicks of each of the
burning
candles, so that the spectacle in front of his eyes was less candle
flame than
six miniature hells, six fragments of the Devil, burning in splendid
isolation. He shuddered with
disgust! But then, remembering where he
was, simply pretended to feel cold and proceeded to gently rub his
hands
together under the table. However,
nobody appeared to be paying him any attention.
For, at that moment, Irene Myers was heard asking the man
opposite her
when he would like them all to turn-up for their voice recordings?
"Oh, no
hurry," O'Donnell replied, momentarily looking-up from his dessert,
which
now contained an especially large helping of cream.
"Of course, I'd be more than willing to
open the recording studio to anyone who wanted to offer his or her
services
next week. I don't require you all to
turn-up at once however, but simply when it's convenient to you. I shall be available on the premises from
approximately
"In which
language?" the young opera star wanted to know.
"English
unfortunately," O'Donnell confessed.
"For I haven't as yet dared to include
foreign
languages in the room of the famous.
Though we're intending to open a separate
room for the
relatively or absolutely non-English speaking famous in due course ...
possibly
later next year. That would
enable us to include such illustrious names as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, Hermann Hesse,
Dmitri Shostakovich, and Pablo Picasso in
the museum,
thereby enhancing its growing reputation.
After all, it's still in its infancy, not by any means grown to
full
maturity, and, as such, there's certainly scope for improvement. Yet that isn't to say the Callas recording is
bad. Au
contraire, she handles
her English very well, on the whole."
"I have in fact
heard her speak before," Sarah revealed, slightly to the director's
disappointment.
"Oh well, I'm sure
you'll be delighted all the same, particularly since she talks about
her social
background rather than her work," he rejoined.
There followed a short
lull in the conversation, before Gowling
inquired of
O'Donnell whether his funny little museum happened to have a recording
by Piet Mondrian
on offer?
"Alas, no!"
the latter sighed. "We're not aware
that he ever made one and, besides, he died in the 1940s, so even if he
had, it
would more than likely be of poor sound-quality and therefore unworthy
of
continuous exhibition. As a rule, we
studiously avoid anything recorded before 1950."
"A shame in one
sense," Lady Handon opined.
"For it means that a
lot of very important famous people are automatically excluded from
public
attention."
"Quite so,"
O'Donnell conceded. "But one has to
begin somewhere, and voices from the second-half of the twentieth
century, or
at least from the 1940s, provide an excellent foundation upon which to
build
our future repertoire, so to speak. No,
we cannot lay claim to a comprehensive collection of famous
twentieth-century
voices because we're obliged to exclude those from early in the
first-half of
the century, which, as you say, is a shame, especially where the most
famous
and important artists are concerned! But
we're certainly doing our best to record everyone of any consequence
who is
currently alive, if that's any consolation to you?"
"A little,"
the hostess drily granted.
"Although being, like my husband, a
member of the older generation, there are one or two pre-war voices
that I'd
personally prefer to hear, in contrast to much of what is currently on
offer,
irrespective of the comparatively poor sound-quality.
Of course, I fully realize that the modern
and, on the whole, more youthful public of today wouldn't share my
preference. But the museum might still
profit, you know, from an extension of the existing range of recordings
back
into the early decades of the current century.
A kind of historical room of early
recordings. And I'm quite convinced
that, in spite of
gaps or omissions, there would be no shortage of material from which to
choose. However, this is only a
suggestion, Girish, not an order! I quite understand your reluctance to expand
too rapidly. Yet suggestions of this
kind may prove useful, particularly if you should one day run into
competition
from foreign voice museums." At
which point she cast him a mildly quizzical glance, and then resumed
eating her
dessert.
Having in the meantime
ordered more drink for the table, Lord Handon
nodded
in agreement and began to expatiate on a rumour he had heard, only the
previous
week, that the French were seriously contemplating the establishment of
a
national voice museum, which would inevitably focus more exclusively on
their
own language and, in all probability, the regional dialects and class
differences thereof, thus bringing the disparate accents of their
loquacious
nation firmly under one roof. "And
before long," he continued, "I shouldn't be at all surprised to see
the Germans and, ahem, Italians following suit, and perhaps even the
Americans
- assuming they can get over the shock that someone else thought up the
damned
idea before themselves!"
"So any aliens from
outer space who wished to find out more about the human voice wouldn't
necessarily have to go to London in the future, but could depend on the
inhabitants of just about any major country in which they happened to
land to
provide them with the relevant information," Geraldine declared
facetiously.
"Indeed, they might
even prefer to hear French or German voices to British ones," her
father
joked.
"Yes, well, as yet
no alternative voice museums actually exist," O'Donnell remarked,
bringing
a serious note back into the discussion, "so we needn't fear immediate
competition. I will of course bear your
suggestion in mind, Pamela, and should we subsequently decide to expand
in that
rather retrograde fashion, I shall give you full credit for it ... as
indeed
for the suggestion you made, last time I was here, concerning the
possibility
of extending our range of vocal sound to include singing, shouting,
laughing,
whistling, crying, coughing, or whatever it was ..."
"I would hardly
have suggested crying or coughing!" Lady Handon
protested, with a look of ironic reproof in her beady eyes. "Although they might
serve the curious purposes of an alien with no knowledge or experience
of such
things! No, I was thinking, more
specifically, of the human voice in various
of its
myriad occupational roles - you know, the opera singer, pop singer,
regimental
sergeant-major, schoolmaster, priest, and so on. For I am convinced that a
room dedicated to the immense variety of occupational contexts would
further
enhance the museum's growing reputation."
"And prevent its
future competitors from forcing it into an imitative role," her husband
added, as he came to the end of his dessert.
"However, let's not burden our guests with any more talk of
that. I'm sure they're dying for a
change of subject."
"On the contrary, I
find it a most fascinating one," Sheila blandly confessed.
"Me too,"
Sarah seconded, her pretty face bursting into a reassuring smile.
The other guests,
however, remained verbally noncommittal.
"Oh well, you'll
all be able to sate your curiosity when you actually visit the museum,"
Lord Handon averred.
"In the meantime, and this evening in particular, I'd like you
to
feel free to enjoy yourselves in a less educative fashion ...
principally by
joining my wife and I in the small ballroom
next-door
for a spot of dancing. After all, this
is New Year's Eve, so we ought to celebrate it in style.
I trust you have no objections, ladies and
gentlemen?"
There were certainly
more than a few slight qualms and alarms at the mention of this, but,
since
no-one seemed to mind, or to express verbal reservations if they did,
the
viscount took it that everyone was agreed on the suitability of his
suggestion,
and clapped his hands together in apparent satisfaction.
"Good!" he cried. "Then as soon as
you're all ready, we
shall proceed to the ballroom." And
that, curiously enough, is what duly happened.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The
room
Lord Handon spoke of was not as
small as one might have supposed, but it was still smaller than the
drawing-room in which his guests had sat prior to dinner.
There was certainly ample space for ten
people to exercise their legs, and, at a guess, one would have said it
could
accommodate at least fifty people in that regard.
Situated on the south
wing of Rothermore House, one entered a
rectangular
room brightly lit by three cut-glass chandeliers and warmly heated by a
large
open fire which blazed fiercely from its hearth in seeming anticipation
of the
dance. Doubtless the servants had just
prepared the room. For it also contained
a copiously-stocked wine cabinet, similar to the one in the
drawing-room, on top
of which stood a variety of wine bottles uncorked and ready for use. Yet 'ballroom' was hardly the word one would
have applied to the room on first entering it.
For not only was the floor covered by a bright-red carpet of
seemingly
immaculate condition, but there were also a number of armchairs and a
couple of
large settees spread along the length of its cream-coloured walls at
various
points, thereby giving one the overall impression of a lounge or even a
sitting-room. And the walls were not
adorned with mirrors, as one might have expected, but with
various-sized glossy
paintings, mostly by minor Italian or French artists of the seventeenth
and
early eighteenth centuries, which were of a decidedly romantic cast. Added to which, the familiar spectacle of
fluted pilasters spaced in solitude at regular distances apart, plus a
few
statuette-prone niches and one more or less had the 'ballroom' in a
nutshell. Yet there was still some
exquisitely carved stucco on the ceiling, reminiscent of Robert Adam,
and more
than a hint of rococo panelling along the lower section of one of the
walls,
thus endowing the room with a stylistic eclecticism as charming as it
was
unusual.
However,
all
this detail had relatively little significance for
Timothy Byrne, as he followed the other guests across the threshold in
a
somewhat perplexed state-of-mind. For he was more concerned with the ominous prospect of
having to
dance than with the stylistic nature of the ballroom itself, and hardly
noticed
his suraroundings. Who-on-earth
would he be expected to dance with, he wondered? And
what
dance to - the Foxtrot,
But this vague and
slightly dishonourable hope was quickly dashed, as Lord Handon
cried out, with a certain roguish gusto it seemed to Timothy: "Choose
your
partners!" and then proceeded to advance towards the centre of the
room,
where his wife was already waiting, impatient, no doubt, for the
dancing to
begin.
"Oh hell!"
sighed Timothy, as he heard the first strains of a gentle Two-Step
descend on
his ears from high up in opposite corners of the room, and realized
that the
challenge was on.
“Well, my dear young
lady," said
For a moment Timothy
almost envied Gowling his choice, but was
soon
distracted from that as he heard Girish
O'Donnell
saying: "I think it's about time you and I put feet together, Irene,"
and the ample figure of the sculptress duly rose from her seat, to
accompany
the director of the world's first and, to-date, only voice museum
unsteadily
across the carpet.
"Two
down, two to go," sighed
Timothy, as he was left face-to-face with his own blank irresolution. Perhaps the choice would be made simpler if
Nigel...?
At
that very moment Townley did in fact
feel it incumbent upon himself to offer an arm to the nearest solitary
female,
who, to Timothy's manifest relief, accepted it without demur and set
off with
Scotch gusto towards the centre of the room.
So that left only one, and she, still dressed in a dark-green
tapering minidress and matt stockings,
happened to be the opera
singer Sarah Field, who smiled encouragingly at Timothy while he
extended a
tentative arm and stammered a gratuitous invitation.
So there they were - ten
pairs of legs shuffling about the centre of the carpet as the music set
the
pace in rather quaintly old-fashioned terms.
At first Timothy's legs seemed unwilling to work, but persisted
in an
awkward stiffness, which brought more than a gentle frown to his
ordinarily
impassive brow! For he had quite
forgotten how to dance a Two-Step and was afraid of stepping on Sarah's
vulnerably-exposed toes and not only causing her physical discomfort,
but
making a thorough fool of himself, to boot!
He shuffled about the carpet begrudgingly, as though incapable
of
spontaneous movement, and, to be sure, an impartial observer might have
supposed him dancing on stilts or wooden legs, so stiff would his
technique
have appeared! Fortunately for him,
however, there was no-one to fit that description in the room at
present, since
those there were all on their feet and endeavouring, as best they
could, to
keep time with the music and avoid bumping into one another. It wasn't even possible to fear that the
servants might be secretly enjoying themselves at one's expense. For they had apparently
been forbidden entry to the room and were thus on duty elsewhere -
presumably
in the region of the kitchens and dining-room.
Well, that was a relief too, and a sufficient
incentive for one to loosen up a bit.
Which, to his surprise, Timothy gradually found himself doing,
as the
music began to get the better of his self-consciousness and to instil a
certain
complacency, partly born of reduced sensibility, into his mind.
Not
that he didn't have to struggle against himself in the process. But, somehow, Sarah's self-confidence began
to make an impression on him and encouraged him to take that redemptive
plunge
with her, when their two bodies would unite in a single movement and
flow into
each other, like two streams meeting in a single river.
As yet, he was just on the brink, still
stiffly apart and uncertain. But the
temptation to merge with her was pressing upon him with greater
insistence,
becoming impossible to ignore. His steps
were less tentative now, more assured of their placings,
and
he
had ceased to frown with virtually every move. He
felt
her body press against him with
greater frequency and ease now, whereas previously they had been almost
afraid
to touch each other. She was smiling
with a fresh candour, and the sweet scent of her perfume was
insinuating itself
into his slightly-dilated nostrils, causing his head to swim with
aromatic
pleasure. Was this really what he had
been afraid of before the dance started,
this subtle
pleasure in sensual gratification? He
smiled his incredulity at the thought of it and, suddenly, as though by
the
wave of a magic wand, the old world of distinctions had slipped away
and he was
at one with Sarah in the rhythm of the dance, had lost his
self-consciousness
and passed over into a world of transpersonal unity.
All in a flash, like that 'click' which
descends upon people who are socially and sexually right for each
other,
heralding the start of a compatible relationship. He
was
all of a sudden in
that other
world and Sarah's smile seemed more endearing to him than ever, her
perfume
still sweeter. He had little time or
inclination
to notice what stage everybody else was at, though if he had bothered
to look
aaround him, he would have seen that all but Gowling
and Geraldine had left their self-consciousness behind and were lifted
up in
the swirling movement of the dance, transported, as it were, to another
realm. They would follow suit later, but
at present both of them were still struggling with their egos -
particularly
Geraldine, who danced rather primly with the taller figure of Gowling.
And so the music
continued as the couples circled around one another with greater
facility,
becoming increasingly part of one large twenty-legged creature with ten
heads. But then, almost without their
expecting it, the old record reached the end of its scratchy duration,
and
suddenly a chilling silence descended upon the room, disrupting the
orgy of
blissful self-forgetfulness. There were
a few appropriate sighs of disappointment from the more ardent dancers
and
then, as if in gratitude for what they had
experienced, a number of smiles, hand claps, and tersely eulogistic
comments. Their faces had already become
quite flushed, especially Lord Handon's,
whose high
blood-pressure and age undoubtedly had something to do with it. But he had no intention of allowing things to
flag and duly hurried across to the record-player, where he proceeded
to turn
the disc over and set its other side in motion.
"Well," said
Sarah to her dancing partner, "it looks as though we're going to be
kept
busy tonight, doesn't it?"
"It does
indeed!" Timothy agreed, and, once more, he put his arm around the opera
singer's waist and set her in graceful motion.
To his delight, she smiled more endearingly than ever as their
bodies
drew gently together, making him feel newly confident.
He wanted, if possible, to draw still closer
to her, but realized that the propriety of the dance precluded it. Besides, he couldn't very well allow himself
to become too ardent in the company of the others, particularly Lord
and Lady Handon, who now danced, it seemed
to him, with a certain
measure of constraint, as though they were approaching the end of their
quota
of energy or were secretly more intent upon surveying the proceedings
aaround
them.
"Oh, so
sorry!" cried Townley above the music, as
he
collided with Timothy and well-nigh sent his slender body sprawling
across the
carpet. "I'm not used to this sort
of thing," he added by way of excuse.
"Neither am I,
actually," the writer confessed, before the swirling throng engulfed
him
afresh.
And so it went on, with Lord
Handon taking sole charge of the stereo
and, until
his retirement through fatigue about an hour-and-a-half later,
effectively
leading the dance. Thereafter the host
and hostess sat watching the younger people amuse themselves in the
centre of
the room, not more than a few yards from the blazing open fire which
Lord Handon judiciously topped-up, from
time to time, with a
small log or two from the pile of chopped logs that lay conveniently
close
to-hand in the spacious hearth. And
every time the prevailing record reached the last of its tiny grooves,
up he
would get to initiate a change of melody and sometimes even a change of
dance,
thereby throwing his guests into fresh confusion. Thus
Timothy
found himself obliged to
improvise a variety of ballroom dances on-the-spot, including the
But, still, the
proceedings were generally fun, and everybody had imbibed too much
alcohol to
care unduly about the quality of their performance.
Even the host, who had drained more glasses
than anybody else, appeared not to take much interest in it after a
while, but
slumped into his armchair with bowed head, as if in response to an
overpowering
tiredness, quite oblivious of his suraroundings.
In the next armchair, his wife stared ruefully at the fire or
cast a
beady and rather abstracted gaze around the room, occasionally bringing
her
attention to rest on one of the small romantic paintings which were
intended
both to avoid the usual ballroom cliché of mirrors and to serve a
mildly
aphrodisiac role. She appeared not to
want to see the dancers, as though their presence was an inconvenience,
a reminder
of her long-past youth and current lack of stamina.
Yet youth and stamina were not exactly the
leading attributes of Girish O'Donnell and
his plump
dancing partner either, and before long, at Irene's prompting, they
also
dropped out of the limelight, leaving the floor to the less bulky
individuals.
So now
there were only three couples in motion, who danced on
oblivious of everyone else, or seemingly so.
For Timothy, especially, had not quite regained that
self-confidence of
the preceding hour and was beginning to weary a little, despite the
ever-enchanting proximity of Sarah Field, whom he resolutely clung to
from fear
that, if someone else were to intervene, he would be irrevocably
plunged back
into his old self-consciousness again.
Better this than that, even if, with all
that
alcohol swirling around in his head, he was now the victim of a downward
self-transcendence, a transcendence such as his logical reasoning mind
would
ordinarily have deemed inferior to upward self-transcendence. Unfortunately this was neither the time nor
the place for the hallucinogenic trip of divine illumination! Like it or not, one had to persist in the
folly of Lord Handon's tastes and give way
to the
Diabolic to a greater or lesser extent.
Such was the situation. Such it
had been for centuries. And such, in all
probability, it would continue to be for ... centuries to come? Perhaps and perhaps not. Who could say for sure?
So they danced on, and
now it was Geraldine who led them, the very same person who, when the
dancing
had first begun, was the least willing to part with her
self-consciousness. Strange
in
a
sense, but more indicative of her adolescent shyness in the imposing
company of
Indeed, the more
abandoned Geraldine became the less abandoned he appeared to be, so
that he was
now dancing with a degree of constraint which, in contrast to his
partner's
freedom, assumed an incongruous and semi-humorous aspect.
He had gone noticeably stiff and become
somewhat self-conscious, occasionally bumping into the other couples,
and this in spite of the fact that they now had more room in which to
manoeuvre
than before. He must have cursed Lord Handon's eccentricity, at such moments, for
depriving the
dancers of mirrors and thereby increasing their chances of colliding,
despite
the limited utilitarian value of mirrors in a crowded ballroom, the
difficulty
of gauging perspective not rendered any easier by alcoholic somnolence
in
relation to the speed of the dance and the number of couples involved. Doubtless the old devil had private
motivations
of his own for doing so!
But the dancing wasn't
to last much longer now. For as Nigel Townley and Sheila Johnston dropped out, more
through
fatigue than lack of ability, a sudden self-consciousness descended on
the two
remaining couples, who feared that they would become the cynosure of
too many
pairs of critical or envious eyes. The
smooth bright carpet on which they slid and twisted suddenly seemed
naked, and
the dancing area itself stretched away on every side, causing them to
feel
somewhat isolated in the centre of it.
Still they danced, however, more out of pride than enjoyment,
and when,
a few minutes later, Timothy and Sarah simultaneously pulled out of the
fray,
even Geraldine had to admit defeat and relinquish her hold on Gowling, to the latter's evident relief.
There was perfunctory
clapping all around, as the last couple abandoned their feet for the
enticing
comfort of the nearest vacant armchairs, slumping into them with a
well-earned
sigh apiece.
"Well
done!" cried Lord Handon,
raising himself a little in his seat the better to survey the couple in
question. "You managed to bring the
beast out of my daughter, Lawrence," he added, with a roguish
chuckle. It was a comment, however, that
his wife didn't appear to appreciate.
For, at that moment, she frowned sullenly and shook her head -
more, it
seemed, for her own benefit than anyone else's.
But this gesture generally passed unnoticed.
It was now quite late,
however, and most of the guests were feeling the lure of sleep,
particularly
those who had danced the longest. Their
bedrooms awaited them on the first floor where, after
"This is the last
drink you'll get this year," their host facetiously declared, as he
returned the empty champagne bottle to the wine cabinet, "so you'd better make the most of it!" And that, ironically, was what they all
endeavoured to do, Timothy almost literally so.
For he half-feared that the viscount
would go
back on his word and fish out another bottle from the wine cabinet's
far from
empty interior.
Mercifully,
that
was not to be the case. For no sooner
had he quaffed back his share
of the champagne and stubbed-out the smouldering remains of an
expensive-looking cigar, than Lord Handon
staggered
over to the stereo in order to hunt out, from among the dozens of
displaced
records there, a recorded version of Auld Lang Syne
with which to facilitate their own rendering of it in due course. By the time he actually found the disc,
however, midnight was already striking, and not only in the ballroom
but in
virtually every other downstairs room throughout the great house as
well,
creating a furious uproar which quite precluded any attempt at
simultaneous
singing.
"Better late than
never, I suppose," Lord Handon averred, as
he
fumbled the record onto the turntable and, with evident difficulty,
strove to
align the stylus with the first of its worn grooves.
After one or two false starts, during which
one heard snatches of the music prematurely, he succeeded in his
objective and,
staggering to his feet again, gestured with outstretched arms that he
wanted
everyone to join him in the centre of the room for the traditional
singing. Such was the peremptory nature
of his gesture that drinks were left unconsumed as everyone, including
Lady Handon, converged on the chosen spot
like vultures upon a
rotting carcass. They had scarcely
arrived there and formed themselves into an approximate circle,
however, when
the music started-up, obliging them to join-in regardless.
To everyone's dismay, Lord Handon
lost his footing and fell forwards into the centre
of the ring, dragging his long-suffering wife down with him. Thereafter a general confusion reigned during
which, whilst endeavouring to sing Auld Lang Syne,
efforts
were
made by one or two of the male guests to get the drunken peer and
his startled wife back on their unsteady feet again.
Eventually success ensued in this regard, but
not before the record had virtually run its course and brought
proceedings to
an embarrassing halt. Nevertheless, Lord
Handon defiantly rallied his forces about
him for a
final onslaught on the vocal cords and initiated a belated though
rousing performance
of the song once more, largely, it seemed, for the servants' benefit. Then, as though following the roar of a loud
explosion, the room fell into a deathly quiet, broken only be the
intermittent
sound of laughter, sighs, snivels, and coughs.
The party was over and, almost to a man, the revellers quietly
dispersed
to the fringes of the room, to finish off their drinks or wipe their
brows or
slump into a welcome armchair. Now at
last they were in the New Year, and it was as though the significance
of this
fact had only just begun to dawn on them, necessitating a slight
readjustment
of psychological perspective.
CHAPTER
SIX
Yes,
it
was New Year's Day, and as he mounted the red-carpeted
stairs, a few minutes later, Timothy Byrne wondered whether the New
Year would
prove kinder to him than the old one had, and, if so, in what ways. Indeed, he was so engrossed in speculation on
this point that it quite startled him to hear Sarah inquiring over his
shoulder, as he reached the door to his bedroom on the guest wing, what
kind of
accommodation he had been allocated for the night.
He turned abruptly in the thickly-carpeted
corridor and confronted his questioner with a blank face.
"Oh, forgive me!" he cried,
blushing as he recognized her. "I
hadn't realized you were following me."
His voice sounded quite leaden with drink and he almost lost his
physical balance as he turned fully towards her. "Have
they
put you in this part of the
house as well?" he foolishly asked.
Sarah returned him one
of her characteristically-endearing smiles.
"Just a little farther along the corridor," she replied,
pointing with her index finger.
"I see," he
responded, vaguely turning his head in the direction indicated. He seemed indecisive as to his next move or
remark and was on the verge of saying goodnight ... when the opera
singer
requested to see the interior of his room.
"Certainly,"
he impulsively replied, and, just as impulsively, opened the door and
pushed
his way in, flicking on the light switch as he went.
"Ah, how
pretty!" exclaimed Sarah, following him inside. "It's
more
cheerful than mine," she
added, with a look at the light-blue wallpaper which clothed the walls
of the
brightly-lit, box-like room. "And the curtains!" She
advanced
a pace towards the maroon velvet
curtains, which hung down to within a few inches of the floor, and
clapped her
hands in admiration of the harmony they formed with the wallpaper. "Let's swap rooms," she playfully
suggested.
For a moment Timothy
thought she was being serious. "What's wrong with yours?" he asked.
"Oh,
nothing really," giggled Sarah. "Or,
rather, it's just that the colours
aren't quite so much to my taste."
She turned towards him and smiled briefly, before adding: "Come
on,
I'll show you it, if you're interested."
It wouldn't have been
very polite of him to say he wasn't, so he obligingly followed her out
through
the half-open door, automatically switching off the light, and made his
way,
with some difficulty, along the corridor to the room next-door. He felt a trifle guilty and foolish about
this, and was almost afraid that someone would see him.
But ahead of him the corridor was deserted,
while behind ... he glanced back over his shoulder and saw no-one - at
least
not at that moment. For just as he
reached Sarah's door the distinctive voice of Girish
O'Donnell was sounding at the top of the stairs, and, before he could
disappear
into her room, the portly figure of the Voice Museum's principal
director had
appeared in the corridor and was advancing towards them, accompanied by
Irene
Myers. There was a faint hint of
recognition from O'Donnell but, rather than acknowledging it, Timothy
hurried
into Sarah's room as fast as he could, under the circumstances of his
inebriation, and shut the door behind him in a panic, fearing they
might have
seen Sarah going in as well. Not that
any such thing was guaranteed. For she had been in front of him, after all, and was in
the process
of opening her door when they rounded the corner.
And, anyway, even if they
had, so what? Did that
necessarily mean ...?
He cast the thought from his mind and advanced unsteadily
towards the
centre of her room, newly reminded of the purpose of his visit, which,
on the
surface at least, seemed perfectly innocent.
For her part Sarah had
sensed nothing of his panic and now stood to one side, pointing out the
colours
she apparently found less cheerful than those in the neighbouring room. "You see?" she sighed, with a
slight air of constraint.
He looked about him,
like a connoisseur of fine art, and nodded his head in apparent
sympathy. Though, in reality, he couldn't
see anything
amiss, since the dark-blue wallpaper and silver-grey velvet curtains
were quite
to his taste. If anything, he preferred
this combination to the one in his own room, which was suggestive of
some
football team, and would have said so, had
not
discretion or something analogous prevailed upon him to hold his tongue. Finally he decided on a compromise by
conceding that, although her room was probably a shade less cheerful,
it was
nonetheless just as brightly lit and no less spacious.
"Not really that bad at all," he
concluded, involuntarily including the silver-quilted double bed which
stood a
few feet to his right. "At least
you won't have to sleep in it longer than tonight."
She smiled in
acknowledgement of this obvious fact and sat down on the corner of the
bed,
nearest to where Timothy was standing.
"No," she agreed, "that's one good thing." Then,
abruptly
changing tack, she asked him
what he thought of the dance earlier?
"Oh, quite amusing
on the whole," he remarked, grinning.
"Not that I'm a particularly accomplished dancer, as you
doubtless
realized. I hope you'll forgive me for
having trodden on your toes so often."
She glanced down at her
pale-stockinged toes and confessed that,
but for a
little wear, they had survived quite well, considering that her dancing
partner
had been wearing some kind of newfangled boots.
"Besides," she added, smiling anew, "I must have
committed more than a few choreographic indiscretions myself, not being
used to
that kind of dancing. So perhaps it's I
who ought to be apologizing to you."
He blushed slightly in
spite of himself, wondering what she could be referring to, and sought
distraction in a small stucco carving of a cherub which graced the top
of a
circular table just in front of where he was still standing, hands
bashfully
tucked inside front pockets. Yet she was
looking at him with a curious interest when next he dared face her,
much as
though he were a work of art worthy of a certain critical appraisal. What could be on her mind, he wondered?
However, before he could
wonder anything else, he heard her say: "I quite liked what you were
saying about your latest religious beliefs, before dinner."
"Oh, really?"
he responded, somewhat surprised and not a little ashamed of his
current
wine-intoxicated condition. Or was it
the fact of his religious beliefs?
"Yes, I think there
must be some truth in it," Sarah declared.
"Quite a lot of truth in fact, in spite of your predilection for
sweeping generalizations of the debunking sort, which are doubtless
more
expedient than pedantic, suggesting a degree of literary licence which,
though
arguably objectionable from a more objectively philosophic standpoint,
at least
has the merit of simplifying things and of obliging one to rethink
accepted
positions."
A smile of gratitude
overcame him with the mention of this.
"I'm glad you think so," he admitted, though he didn't fully
understand the latter part of her remark.
"However, I'm aware that Lady Handon
wouldn't agree with such an opinion."
"No, she appears to
be something of a religious conservative," Sarah confirmed,
wrinkling-up
her brows in evident disdain.
"Still, one can't win them all.
What she believes in is obviously right for her."
"Indeed,"
Timothy conceded with a hint of weariness in his voice.
"Nevertheless, for people like you and
I, such traditional criteria as she apparently subscribes to are far
from
right. They would simply keep one moored
to the Diabolic Alpha at the expense of the Divine Omega, binding one
to the
Creator in worshipful subjection to theocratic authoritarianism, and
thus
preventing the achievement of religious freedom in self-realization. For without Freethinking, there is only
enslavement, and the freer and more advanced the thinking, the more
will the
Alpha appear diabolic and only the Omega divine." He
turned
around and was on the point of
returning to his room, when Sarah's voice halted him in his tracks.
"Do you like
opera?" she asked.
"Some of it,"
he replied, smiling faintly.
"French opera, in particular."
A look of gratified
surprise came into the opera singer's large eyes. "And
have
you ever heard me sing?"
"Yes,
once, in Manon
at
Her look of gratified
surprise
blossomed handsomely into a smile of relief.
"And did you like it?" she wanted to know, her dark-brown eyes
sparkling gaily in the reflection of the light from the small
chandelier
overhead.
"I did
indeed," he admitted, blushing slightly in spite of his semi-drunken
predicament. "As it happens, you
reminded me quite a lot of Beverly Sills, not only as regards the way
you sang
but also with regard to your appearance.
It was through a recording of Manon
by Sills
and Gedda that I first got to know of the
opera,
actually."
"Yes, one of the
classic recordings," Sarah opined in a tone of undisguised enthusiasm.
"I guess it would
have to be, what with Gedda in it,"
Timothy
rejoined, smiling appreciatively.
"He's still my favourite tenor.
However, I was keenly appreciative of Souzay
as 'Lescaut' and Castel
as
'Gillot', too.
Not to mention Bacquier as 'Le Compt de Grieux',
for that
matter. His voice is unforgettable! But the bass part which has given me most
pleasure to-date is undoubtedly Boris Christoff's
rendering of 'Mephistopheles' in a recording of Gounoud's
Faust. What power! What
brilliance of execution! There are times
when one's hair virtually
stands on-end!"
"I quite
agree," Sarah responded. "He
is one of the great masters. And he was
with Gedda in the recording you allude to,
wasn't
he?"
"Indeed he
was!" Timothy smilingly confirmed. "Gedda and
"You forgot to
mention
"Yes, and then the
libretto is very good, which is more than can be said, in my opinion,
for Pelléas
et Mélisande,
especially
where the tedious reiteration of 'petit
père' is concerned!
That just about drained my patience, I'm
afraid."
Sarah graciously
admitted to finding that part of the opera a bit trying herself. Then,
realizing that Timothy was still
standing in the centre of the room with hands in pockets, she invited
him to
sit beside her, so that they could discuss opera in comfort. There was no reason, she said, why he should
tire his legs standing there when a soft bed was conveniently close
to-hand.
Although he was somewhat
mentally fatigued and mindful, at this juncture, of the lateness of the
hour,
he complied with her invitation - more from a relief to be off his feet
at last
than from anything else.
So they sat side-by-side
and discussed opera, Timothy relating his experiences of a variety of
recordings, Sarah, for her part, merely content to comment upon them
and offer
a professional opinion from time to time.
She confessed to having sung in all the major French operas and
to
preferring her role as 'Carmen' to either that of 'Margueritta'
or
'Manon', though each of these she found
preferable
to 'Melisande', which was less inspiring.
"And Werther?"
asked
Timothy, becoming doubly
inebriated by the sweetness of her perfume and the graceful flow of her
conversation.
"Yes, I was '
"As
a singer or as a person?" Timothy queried.
"As a person,"
Sarah confessed.
The writer chuckled
softly and offered her a gentle look of commiseration.
"My only experience of Werther
came via Nicolai Gedda
and
"You seem to prefer
listening to records than actually visiting the opera," Sarah deduced.
"In point of fact,
I do," Timothy admitted, "though that's partly because what I'd like
to hear isn't always available when I want it, and partly, too, because
I'm
able to borrow records from the local library and thus sate my musical
curiosity free-of-charge, in the privacy of my flat."
Here he felt like adding a word or two about
his preference for the spiritualization of art through reproductions or
recordings, but decided not to risk either offending Sarah by or
burdening
himself with the corollary of a detailed explication of his
philosophical
position - a position which Lord Handon's
guided tour
of the library, billiards room, etc., had earlier made him freshly
conscious
of, and with a vengeance! For, as a
rule, he preferred the elimination of the material factor in opera,
which
recordings provided, to the actual live performance itself. Just as he preferred a
colour photograph, or photographic reproduction, of a statue to the
statue
itself. It was all part of his
transcendentalism and the modern trend towards a greater
spiritualization of
art and life generally. The disembodied
voices which assailed or charmed the ear were spiritual presences
merely,
abstractions of real people - like, for that matter, the actors and
actresses
who graced the cinema screen. Nothing tangible or material about them - ghostly
presences,
rather, which attested to the higher spiritual culture of contemporary
man.
If one went to the
cinema it wasn't to see real bodies moving about on screen but, on the
contrary, the cinematic reproduction of such bodies.
It was analogous to looking through glossy
art books at the photographic reproductions of paintings, sculptures,
ceramics,
and the like. At its best, cinema was
undoubtedly a higher and more spiritual art-form than, say, theatre,
which, by
contrast, dealt in real presences, no less tangible than material. Admittedly drama could be spiritualized
through the medium of film, and so, too, could opera, as had occurred
in a
number of memorable productions, including Tosca. Perhaps this was the best way to experience
drama or opera in-the-round these days - simply by sitting in front of
a colour
television with good quality hi-fi?
Although if one valued the music and singing above the stage
scenery,
costumes, lighting, singers, and action, then a good quality stereo
would
doubtless serve one's purposes better.
The primary ingredients of opera, viz. music and singing, would
be
catered for on a superior level to what they would receive from a
televised
performance in-the-round, where the sound reproduction was likely, as a
rule,
to be less good. Yet whatever one's
bias, it seemed not improbable that cultural progress was being
manifested
through these electronic media, which transformed an initially
dualistic
material/spiritual performance into one of spiritual one-sidedness. The closer men drew to the Omega Point, the
more spiritual their art would become.
Film projector, television, video recorder, cassette recorder,
stereo,
camera - these were the kinds of media through which Timothy believed
culture
could be experienced in the highest way, detached from the physical,
the
natural, the sensual.
Yes, he would rather
watch opera on film or listen to it on disc than experience an actual
performance of it in public, and, confessing as much to Sarah, he
smiled to
himself, reminded of his reasons for doing so.... Not that he was
completely
consistent in this respect, since he had of course visited the opera on
occasion, when the need for a little materialistic reassurance
presented
itself. In an age of transition from the
mundane to the transcendent, the natural to the artificial, one
couldn't be
blamed, after all, for the occasional backsliding into traditional
criteria. Unless one had been blessed
with a consistently progressive or spiritually-advanced mentality, it
wasn't
expedient to be too transcendental. One
could risk or even succumb to a serious brain injury somewhere along
the
over-idealistic line.
Be that as it may, Sarah
seemed a twinge saddened by his preference for recorded performances
and
asserted, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, that while discs,
tapes, etc.,
were wonderful inventions, it was still good to get a taste of the real
thing
from time to time, in order to be brought into closer contact with what
actually prompted the singing.
"After all, a disembodied voice isn't the best key to the lock
of
love in which the principal characters are trapped," she said, with
another of those subtly-endearing smiles on her lips.
"No, I guess
not," conceded Timothy, who was conscious, as never before, of the
extremely close proximity of the opera singer to him at this moment. "One must see it in the flesh as
well," he found himself saying, half-hypnotized by her stare.
"And, if possible,
touch it," she murmured.
"As well as smell
it," he rejoined, mindful of her scent and the complementary freshness
of
her skin, a mere couple of inches from the tip of his nose.
"And thereby
experience it personally," she concluded, gently closing her eyes
against
the kiss which, at that moment, Timothy felt impelled to bestow upon
her lips
in response to the brazen cue just offered him.
Amazingly, a single kiss
was sufficient to precipitate them into each other's arms and initiate
a series
of more ardent kisses, which duly led to Sarah firmly closing her eyes
against
Timothy's carnal onslaught and meekly submitting to his physical
objectives -
objectives which were to encompass far more than her lips ... as he
gently
pushed her down on the bed and climbed over her reclining form, the
better to
achieve them. Now he wanted to get more
closely involved with her than he had done in the ballroom before
midnight; to
get so closely involved with her, in fact, as to make the rhythmic posturings of their dancing routines appear
comparatively
superficial. Now there would be no
clothes or fellow-dancers between him and his movements.
It would be a direct communion of flesh to
flesh, a return to the primeval life-urge, a
fitting
climax to the New Year's Eve festivities.
He had been so well-juiced for it, this ultimate sensual communion, that it didn't really matter to him
now whether
or not he subsequently got back to his own room again.
If sleep overtook him he would stay where he
was, wrapped in the tight embrace of Sarah's arms - submerged in
sensual
abandon.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The
following
morning was pleasantly bright and as, one by one,
the guests came down to breakfast, they were greeted by the full-face
of the
sun as it shone in shamelessly through the tall windows of the
breakfast room,
on the west wing of Rothermore House. Timothy, however, contrived to turn his back
on it, as he arrived at the large round table at which everyone was
invited to
sit; for he rather disliked a direct confrontation with the Diabolic
Alpha at
this time of day, and trusted that it would be less harmful to his back
than to
his face. He didn't of course mention
this to anyone, lest they thought him crazy.... Although Lady Handon half-divined what was on his mind by the
eagerness
and determination with which he had acquired himself this particular
seat. She smiled ironically to herself and
proceeded to sip the Chinese tea which the ageing butler had just
poured into
her dainty cup. Behind her, and
therefore in front of Timothy, an open fire crackled forcefully in its
hearth. The writer, for his part,
preferred not to notice it.
"Well, I trust you
all had a comfortable night," said Lord Handon,
as
he
took his place at table and briefly scanned the assembled faces, all
but
one of which had a noticeably pallid look.
"Very comfortable
thanks," admitted Sarah, whose candour caused Timothy a slight
embarrassment
at what seemed to him like an oblique allusion to his own contribution
to it.
"Good!" said
Lord Handon in a business-like manner. "As long as you all managed to get some
rest after yesterday evening's physical exertions and don't find the
first
morning of January 1981 unduly oppressive ..."
"Unfortunately I
had a nightmare," Irene Myers interposed, slightly to everyone's horror.
"Hardly the most
auspicious start to the new year for you then!" Lady Handon
declared over the rim of her steaming cup.
"I trust you didn't suffer a similar fate, Mr Byrne," she
added, focusing her beady attention upon the rather washed-out face
opposite,
which, to her surprise, blushed perceptibly and shook its head.
"Fortunately
not!" he replied, all too conscious that he probably suffered a worse
one
in not getting any sleep at all. For it
was so late by the time Sarah let him go ... that he had quite passed
the point
of sleep and could do no better than to doze fitfully in his solitary
room,
tortured by the incessant twittering of sparrows in some nearby trees. Now his head had something of the vacuity of
an exploded shell about it, as though his brain had been removed and a
dull
void left in its place. He smiled with a
kind of cadaverous leer which the hostess appeared not to like very
much; for
she sharply turned her face away.
"And how about you,
sir?" she inquired of Girish O'Donnell,
noting
the speed with which the Voice Museum's principal director was draining
his cup
of black coffee.
"Oh, just a slight
hangover," he drawled, falling victim to one of the most palpably
obvious
of understatements. "Nothing
to
grumble
about, really!"
"You danced
exceedingly well last night, Girish,"
opined
Lord Handon, countering palpable
understatement with
no-less palpable overstatement.
"Indeed, you all danced very well, including you, Geraldine."
His daughter couldn't
prevent herself blushing at this remark, and cast Gowling
an optimistic glance, as though expecting him to confirm it. However, the artist was preoccupied with the
piled-up flaky contents of his cereal bowl and therefore didn't respond
to her
in any noticeable way. But she wasn't to
be rebuffed by this fact and declared that she had probably danced
better last
night than ever before - a declaration which caused Gowling
a comparable degree of embarrassment.
"Really?"
cried Lord Handon on a note of ironic
surprise. "That's putting it rather
strongly, I
must say!"
Not surprisingly his
wife preferred to say nothing about that, but tactfully switched the
conversation to her guests' impending departures, now that their New
Year's Eve
celebrations were a thing of the past.
"I take it you'll all be able to return to your various
destinations today, bearing in mind the reduced public transport," she
said.
All but two of them were
destined to return to
"Yes, I don't
suppose there'll be any trains running," Lord Handon
remarked, endeavouring to qualify his wife's almost contradictory
question.
"Don't worry, I can
take the others back in my car," O'Donnell declared.
"I have enough space in the old banger
for at least half-a-dozen people."
He was of course alluding to his Mercedes, which was parked in
front of
the house beside Irene's Porsche and Lord Handon's
Rolls. It would be far better travelling
back to town in that than waiting around for taxis or buses, and the
relevant
guests thanked O'Donnell for his offer and accepted without a qualm -
especially Timothy, who hadn't much enjoyed the solitary journey down
by train
in any case.
"Good, then that
takes care of that problem," Lady Handon
concluded with an air of finality, and she accordingly relapsed into a
welcome
silence.
Following breakfast, the
guests retired to the drawing-room for a spate of informal conversation
prior
to their impending departures, Lord Handon
encouraging those of them who could stand the sight of alcohol to
sample a
fresh glass as a leave-taking tribute.
But most of them seemed in need of fresh air, and, perceiving
this, the
viscount offered to take everyone on a guided tour of his grounds,
including
the stables, gardens, and parkland. As
the weather was so sunny that morning, most of the guests accepted with
alacrity,
and, before long, a little party of warmly-clad individuals had
assembled in
the spacious vestibule behind the north door, eager for exercise.
Geraldine, however, was
of the opinion that it would be better for them to divide into two
groups
rather than set off en
masse across the lawns, like a herd of cattle. She
accordingly
offered, by way of example,
to take a few of their guests around the west wing of the house and
through the
stables, while her father took the rest of them in the opposite
direction, in
order to meet-up with her group at some point to the south. The idea seemed a good one and consequently,
with minimum deliberation, the party divided accordingly and set off in
their
respective directions.
To his relief, Timothy
found himself in Geraldine's group, which included
"Ah!"
exclaimed Gowling, as he deeply inhaled
and exhaled
the crisp morning air. "How
refreshing
to be out at this time of day! Just the way to clear away
a hangover, what?"
Geraldine smiled her
acknowledgement of him, but made no comment.
She had changed into a pair of pale-pink cords and was wearing a
navy-blue anorak over a woolly jumper.
Her hair was still pinned up, but less formerly now than the day
before. Instead of forming a bun on the
crown of her head, it rested in a loose rectangle at the back, making
her look,
if anything, slightly more attractive.
There was a faint hint of make-up on her face, but nothing
overtly
seductive. Her eyes shone with pleasure
as she led the men across the English garden and around to the West
Front. No doubt, she was relieved to be
free of her
parents' restrictive company.
"Let's take a look at the goldfish," she said, pointing out a
small artificial pond which stood in front of the Front in question. "My mother is rather keen on goldfish
and I seem to have inherited an aptitude for them myself.
A case of acquired characteristics, wouldn't
you say, Mr Byrne?"
The writer automatically
raised wary brows, but graciously conceded her the benefit of the doubt.
"My God, there must
be hundreds of them in it!" Gowling
observed, as
they reached the goldfish pond.
"They're literally crawling over one another!"
"Yes, it is rather
a cramped environment," Geraldine admitted. "Although
we
usually sell off a number
of them every year and thereby maintain a fairly stable population. We're intending, anyway, to extend the size
of our ponds soon - there's one like this, incidentally, in front of
each wing
of the house - so as to provide our little darlings with more privacy."
"Privacy?"
Townley repeated, with an ironic expression
on his
face.
But Geraldine was more
interested in staring at Gowling's
reflection in the
shallow water than justifying her use of words, while the artist, for
his part,
was too engrossed in the pond's contents to notice that he was being
secretly
admired.
"Well, let's
proceed, shall we?" Geraldine at length suggested, and, together, they
continued in the direction they had been taking, on past the West Front. Here, too, Timothy couldn't help noticing
that the Baroque features of the North Front were in ample evidence,
particularly as regards the equidistant placing of Corinthian
pilasters, and he
noticed, moreover, that Townley was taking
more
interest in the general exterior of the house itself than in the
surrounding
grounds, which, for an architect, was only to be expected, or so he
supposed. But this was only in passing. For soon they came upon the stables, no
farther than a hundred-and-fifty yards away, and heard the sounds of
horses
neighing and champing - sounds which Townley
couldn't
help commenting upon as they drew near.
"Our approach has evidently excited them," he observed,
raising his nostrils to inhale the smell of freshly-deposited horse droppings. "How many do you have?"
"Just four
nowadays," Geraldine replied, with a hint of regret in her voice. "We used to have six, but, since my
older sister went to live elsewhere and my younger brother got killed
in a plane
crash, we decided to part with theirs.... This one's called Smoky," she
revealed, patting a large grey stallion on the nose.
"It's the favourite of my father, who
owns the stallion on the right, too. But
this one's mine." His name was
Badger, and he was a dark-brown horse of slightly less than average
height. He seemed to like having his
mane fondled and Geraldine was keen to oblige.
"The remaining horse belongs to my mother," she continued,
drawing attention to a black mare to Badger's left, "and her name's
Stella. But since mother doesn't ride
very often these days, she's mostly entrusted to our groom, who is a
reliable
horseman."
"So what's the name
of your father's other horse?" asked Timothy, who happened to be
standing
directly in front of it.
"Dapper," said
Geraldine. "Because he is, see?"
There was an uprush of amusement among the three men, who
eyed the
dapper-brown stallion in question with admiring looks.
For his part, Dapper neighed gently and
stared back at them with a nonchalance bordering on contempt - or so it
seemed. Inscrutability was, after all, a
hallmark of the horse!
"Do you ride
regularly?" Gowling asked Geraldine,
following a
short pause in their conversation.
"Whenever I'm here
I do, which is mostly during the vacations," she replied, smiling. "Unfortunately, being
away at college means that I don't now ride as often as before. But I shall probably come down here for the
occasional weekend, during the months ahead, and wrench my horse away
from our
groom for a few hours. What about you -
do any of you ride?"
Gowling
admitted to an occasional tendency in that august direction, while both
Timothy
and Townley shook their respective heads,
the
architect adding that he would welcome an opportunity to do so - a
sentiment
not shared, however, by the writer, who had never ridden a horse in his
life
and had no desire to, largely because he found the idea of intimate
contact
with a large beast repugnant.... To be sitting on a horse somewhere in
the
country - no, that was definitely not for him!
He almost shuddered at the thought of it. On
principle,
he could never have given-in to
complacency on
a beast in the country.
He simply wanted to aspire towards God by expanding his spirit. But how could one possibly do that seated on
a horse, with nature airing its mundane prejudices all around one? Impossible!
No, horses were definitely not for him!
However, Townley was interested and Gowling
fairly proud of the fact that he occasionally rented a horse for the
day. After all, horses were the most noble
of
beasts and not at all bad company. Yet
when Geraldine said she would like to see him ride, poor Gowling
quite blushed with shame at the connotation with sex to which the word
gave
rise in his vulnerable imagination! For
it seemed to him that the young lady was deliberately provoking him. He could have sworn he detected a mischievous
gleam in her eyes. "You don't mean
now, do you?" he gasped, in his perplexity.
"No, of course not,
silly!" she retorted. "Some
other
time."
He mentally sighed his relief and wiped some imaginary sweat
from his
brow.
"Well, now that
you've all seen the horses, let's explore a bit farther afield,
shall we?" suggested Geraldine, leading the way out of the stables and
on
across the open parkland to the left of the South Front, in the general
direction of a thick wood beyond.
"No sign of the
other group from here," Gowling observed,
looking across to his right, where he had vaguely expected to sight
Lord Handon's four followers.
The others cast a glance
in the same direction and Geraldine explained how that was probably
because her
father had turned into the wood on the far side of the house, in order
to
explore the river which ran through it.
"He's recently had a few fancy wooden bridges installed, which
he's
probably keen to inspect and show off," she went on.
"But don't worry, we'll doubtless bump
into them before long."
The parkland stretched
on quite some distance to either side of them and had the appearance of
being
well-kept, despite the ugly proximity, every now and then, of copious
weeds,
which had sprouted in the otherwise bare flower-beds, and of overgrown
hedges,
bent forward under the oppressive weight of their evergreen foliage. A number of saplings were propped-up on
wooden supports against the inclemency of winter, intended, no doubt,
to form a
new avenue of trees in due course. For
it was apparent, from a brief inspection of the area, that Lord Handon liked to have his saplings planted in
rows, like
soldiers or, rather, cadets on parade.
Less ordered, however, was the wood towards which Geraldine was
now
leading them. It had a rough path
through it but no sign of any intentional cultivation, and the prospect
of his
having to traverse this intensification of nature wasn't at all to
Timothy's
liking! Indeed, he wasn't particularly
happy to be exploring the parkland anyway, even its most cultivated
parts,
which still struck his transcendental mentality as evil, if relatively
less so
than the patently uncultivated parts.
But it was into the wood that Geraldine led them, and he just
didn't
have the nerve to back out or object. Gowling and Townley
would
probably have thought him mad were he to do so, not being on his
spiritual
wavelength. All he could reasonably do
was to brave it, and this he endeavoured to do as they came upon the
beaten
path at the entrance to the wood and passed over into raw nature.
"If we're in luck,
we might get a glimpse of some of the deer that roam about in here,"
said
Geraldine.
"How many deer are
there?" asked Townley.
"About fifty at the
last count," the young lady revealed.
"Mostly deeper into the wood of course, and
more
over to the far side. You can see
quite a lot of wildlife in here though, including foxes.
Look, there's a squirrel scampering up a tree
over there! Can you see it?"
Halted, the men followed
her finger in the direction indicated, and for a moment Timothy had a
recollection of Sarah doing the same thing in the passageway outside
his room
the previous night. "Quite clearly,"
Gowling admitted, as the squirrel came to a
sudden
halt half-way up the tree trunk, as though in suspended animation. "One can see how this wood must be
something of a naturalist's paradise, during certain times of the year
and
under the right conditions."
Geraldine smiled warmly
before trudging on again. Only Timothy
refrained from showing signs of pleasure here.
For the fact of this wood being a naturalist's paradise could
only mean
it was a transcendentalist's hell, and he needed no reminding.... Not
that it
was the worst of earthly hells, since a tropical jungle would have been
far
worse, to his way of thinking. And even
this place would, in his opinion, have been worse in the middle of
summer than
at present, deprived of all but its bare bones, so to speak, in the
heart of
winter. Still, even in this depleted
context, it was a place he would have preferred to avoid.
"We used to have
hunts here at one time," Geraldine was saying, principally for the
benefit
of the others, as they continued along the path, Timothy at the rear.
"What, deer
hunts?" Townley surmised.
"Sometimes deer and
sometimes foxes," Geraldine confessed.
"At any rate, my grandfather was keen on hunting and used to run
with the pack, as they say, across the park and into this wood at
various
points, usually to emerge again on the far side and continue the chase
across
open country. But my father preferred
shooting grouse to hunting animals, so I never got to see more than an
occasional deer or fox hunt."
"Does he still
shoot?" Timothy asked, over Townley's
shoulder.
"Oh yes, quite
often," Geraldine replied. "Mostly pheasants, of course.
Why, do you object to blood sports?"
"Yes and no."
"What do you mean
by 'yes and no', you ambivalent man?"
"Well, 'yes', because
I'd rather people spent their time doing better things than chasing
about after
wild animals or birds," Timothy informed her, "and 'no' because I'd
rather men made war on beasts than worshipped them.
In the final analysis, I don't object to
people preventing the lower creatures from becoming too populous. Though I suppose it would be better if
society was arranged in such a fashion that either the State or some
other
authority could take greater responsibility for keeping their numbers
in check,
by having trained professionals do the job of culling them, in order to
make
the business less a sport than a moral and ecological obligation."
"Ah, I see,"
said Geraldine. "Well, you won't
find the lower creatures too populous around here, I can assure you! Not unless you're also alluding to ants,
beetles, worms, sparrows, and other such lowly creatures?"
Timothy made no comment,
but contented himself, instead, with a private reflection on the sad
fact that
the lowest of all creations, viz. raw nature, was far too populous or,
at any
rate, abundant here, even in the heart of winter.
Yet if Geraldine
half-divined his thoughts she didn't let-on, nor draw attention to the
impracticality of greater state responsibility in the matter of culling
wild
animals professionally while land was still in private ownership, but
continued
to lead the way and talk about her father's shooting abilities, which
were of
quite a high standard apparently.
"I'd love to have a
crack at shooting grouse myself one day," Gowling
revealed, in due course.
"Well, perhaps we
can arrange that for you," Geraldine commented, and, as she briefly
turned
towards him, the artist found himself becoming embarrassed again for no
apparent reason or, rather, for reasons best known to himself. "That would be most kind of you,"
he averred, slightly to Timothy's distaste.
The path wound on into
the distance but, mercifully for Timothy,
didn't stray too far into the wood, so that it was possible,
every now
and then, to glimpse part of the South Front of Rothermore
House away in the distance, as one came upon a small clearing between
the trees
and bushes to one's right. Glimpsed from
this distance, the house seemed quite small.
But it was still a vaguely reassuring spectacle for anyone who
preferred
civilization to nature, and provided Timothy with a brief reprieve from
the
gloomy thoughts which surged through his nature-stricken consciousness,
like
doom-besotted ghosts. Overhead, the
regular flapping of wings attested to an abundance of bird life here,
and Gowling must have looked-up at the
startled creatures, from
time to time, with more than a vague desire to pull the trigger of a
gun and
send one or two of them crashing beak-foremost to earth.
Geraldine, however, had other things on her
mind.
"Look!" she
cried, bringing the men to a sudden halt again.
"There's a fallow deer over there.
D'you see
it?"
The pale-brown deer, a
doe, had certainly seen them and now kept a watchful eye on the
intruding
humans from where it stood, some seventy or so yards to their left.
"How
pretty she is!" Townley
observed, instinctively dropping his voice to almost a whisper. "And so small
really!" But the doe had
seen enough of them by now, and suddenly made off deeper into the wood.
"Perhaps she has a
mate waiting for her somewhere," joked Gowling as they got under way again.
"She might
have," Geraldine responded, smiling slyly, "although we're not
exactly in the heart of the rutting season at present and, as such, the
bucks
tend to be somewhat aloof ... like certain men at this time of year,"
she
added, a shade ironically.
Gowling
experienced a painful recrudescence of his former embarrassment and
endeavoured
to hide his face from Geraldine by looking in the opposite direction
... across
towards Rothermore House.
It was evident that she was teasing him
again! Timothy, on the other hand,
smiled faintly and offered no comment.
Recalling to mind his intimacy with Sarah the previous night, he
felt
confident that Geraldine couldn't very well have been alluding to him -
at
least not as far as he
was concerned. For he had seen more than
enough female flesh
to last him a good few nights to come!
To be sure, the
recollection of his pulling down Sarah's little white nylon panties and
placing
an exploratory kiss on her pubic hair caused his smile to expand
slightly, in
spite of the uncongenial environment in which he still found himself. Because he was walking just behind the
others, however, this smile went unnoticed and he didn't have to
justify
it. No doubt, Geraldine, in particular,
would have been intrigued! Anyway, he
was relieved that it was
"Do you get many
fish here?" Townley asked, as they stared
down
into the gently-flowing stream which glistened with myriad patches of
sunlight,
like some kind of kaleidoscope.
"Not in the stream
itself," Geraldine replied.
"For, as you can see, it's rather shallow and stony. But certainly in the river. My father has caught more than a few salmon
there over the years. Quite
large
ones,
too. After grouse
shooting, it's his next favourite sport."
"Oh,
really?" Townley responded, his
face
aglow with polite interest. "I used
to do a spot of fishing myself at one time.
On the Wey, in
"How lovely!" Geraldine
exclaimed. "They tell me there are
some ideal spots for fishing, along the Wey."
"Ideal
if you discount the counter-productive influence of
passing rowing boats," Townley retorted,
with a
faint good-natured chuckle. "They
often scare the fish away. And sometimes
the less-accomplished rowers have a fatal tendency to get their oars
entangled
in one's line, which can be pretty frustrating, I can tell you!"
A chorus of sympathetic
humour erupted from his listeners, before Geraldine assured him that
there
weren't any boats on their
river, so one could fish in
peace. "My brother used to catch tiddlers in this stream," she remarked
nostalgically,
as they continued to skirt its edge.
"Tiddlers?"
echoed
Timothy and, smiling inwardly, he
recalled his own rather frustrating efforts, as a small boy, to catch
either tiddlers, tadpoles, or aquatic
insects in his fishing net
at Bagshot Ponds or off the tiny wooden
bridge in the
park at Farnham. Mostly he just caught
weeds and stones. It was enough to put
him off fishing for good (long before mature reflection, as an adult,
led him
to conclude that fishing for pleasure was on a par with blood sports
and
therefore no less reprehensible from a moral standpoint).
However, disillusioned as much by the nature
of his catch as by the humble means employed, he later gravitated to
feeding
monkeys on the Hogs Back. It was a
slightly
more rewarding occupation than waiting for non-existent or extremely
recalcitrant
tiddlers! But the Wey? He smarted with repressed indignation at the
indirect insult just received from the unsuspecting Nigel Townley,
who, it seemed, objected to boating there.
Had not he, Timothy Byrne, spent many a pleasant afternoon
rowing down
the Wey without disturbing a single
fishing
enthusiast or noticing a single fish, except the occasional dead one
floating
on the water's surface, compliments, in all probability, of the rod
fraternity? And had he not been
inconvenienced
himself, on a number of occasions, by fishing lines cast too far out
and
necessitating an abrupt change of direction, which usually resulted in
one's
colliding with the nearest bank? God
knows, there were so many sharp bends and unexpected twists-and-turns
in the Wey, that it was difficult enough
to avoid clashing with
one or other of its banks at the best of times!
But for this bloke to complain about the inconvenience caused by
rowers!
However, Timothy had no
real desire to drag up his childhood or youth by the banks of this
little
stream, even though, in the circumstances, it wasn't entirely
irrelevant. As a child one was always,
after all,
something of a savage, and thus more partial to the barbarous influence
of
nature's predatory instincts. A miniature pagan, at the furthest possible moral remove
from God,
or very nearly so. For it was
probably truer to say that the very earliest children, in the childhood
of the
human race, so to speak, had been at a still-further remove from the
Holy
Spirit than were their latter-day counterparts - bad enough as they
generally
were!
By now, however,
Geraldine's group had come upon sight of Lord Handon's
in the distance, and, together, they quickened their pace to approach
them. Yet if the former had spotted the
latter, it was hardly the case that a reciprocal spotting had taken
place with
the other group. For
they stood with their backs to the approaching quartet and were staring
down
into the water which ran beneath the sturdy wooden parapet upon which
they all
leant. Or so it appeared for an
instant. For as Geraldine's group got a
slightly better view of the bridge, thanks to a narrow clearing beyond
the
path, it soon became apparent that only Girish
O'Donnell and Irene Myers were actually leaning on the parapet, since,
much to
Timothy's surprise, the remaining two guests were leaning against Lord Handon, one on either side of him, while he held
a
supporting arm around their respective waists.
Yet this, too, was an optical illusion or, at any rate, only a
very
transient posture. For, on closer
inspection, it soon became evident that Lord Handon’s
hands weren't exactly static, but actively roaming backwards and
forwards over
their respective behinds.
"Shush!"
hissed Geraldine, bringing them to a sudden standstill, the better to
spy on
the proceedings farther afield. Then, following the inevitably excited pause,
she whispered: "Can you see what I see?"
"Plainly,"
Timothy admitted on a note of disgust.
Townley
sniggered softly and shook his head in amazement. "It
seems
that you were perfectly right
to say this place must be a naturalist's paradise,
Geraldine had put her
hand on Gowling's arm in involuntary
response to her
father's actions and was causing him to blush anew, despite his
manifest
interest in the occupants of the bridge.
"Gosh, we could certainly do with some binoculars now!" he
managed to say.
In point of fact,
binoculars would not have taught them much they didn't already know. For, from where they now stood, they could
even see the smiling faces of Sheila and Sarah frequently turning up
towards
the viscount, as he whispered or murmured something evidently endearing
into
their eager ears. A
smile, and then another little bout of hand roaming on Lord Handon's
part. Another
smile, followed by more of the same.
And then, quite unexpectedly, a spurt of more adventurous
caressing in
relation to Sarah, as the hand nearest to her caught the rim of her minidress and gently lifted it up, thereby
exposing the
greater part of her pale-stockinged legs to
the rapt
attention of Geraldine's group - an action which precipitated a fresh
wave of
amazement, not to say amusement, among them.
"My goodness, what
will the old sod do next?" Geraldine was
asking
in a patently rhetorical fashion.
"Are you sure that
wasn't the wind which blew it up?" queried Gowling,
who
was
slightly myopic in any case.
"Positively,"
Geraldine assured him. "I always
knew my father was a lecher, but really...!" She
cast
him a sort of reassuring glance,
before adding: "I don't think I ought to watch this any longer."
"Frankly, I don't
think there'll be much more to watch," said Timothy, conscious, now he
had
got over his initial shock, of a feeling of jealousy in relation to
Lord Handon's liberties.
"Maybe that's what
you prefer to believe," Geraldine retorted, an ironic smile on her lips.
He shot her a withering
look, but almost immediately regretted it, and relapsed, instead, into
a morose
silence.
"I'm surprised that
Girish and Irene aren't more intrigued by
their
guide's familiarities with the others," Gowling
declared to no-one in particular.
"They appear to be
more interested in themselves," Townley
observed. "Arm-in-arm
and talking quite volubly, by the look of it."
"A pity we can't
hear what they're saying from here," Geraldine murmured.
"But if we go any closer, they're bound
to see us."
Timothy was beginning to
feel the cold. "In all probability,
they've only got their arms around each other to keep warm," he opined.
"It's not that
cold!" Geraldine objected.
"Yet even if that
applies to Girish and Irene," conceded Townley, "it hardly explains or justifies the
posture,
as it were, of the others."
"Quite," both
Geraldine and Gowling confirmed
simultaneously.
"Unless, of course,
your father is endeavouring to keep his right hand warm by using
Sarah's dress
as a glove," Townley rejoined, in an
attempt to
elucidate his objections.
"I must say, she
does have a nice pair of legs," Gowling
declared
half-humorously.
"So does Sheila,
incidentally," the architect revealed.
"Oh? And just when
did you discover that
fact?" Geraldine asked.
For Sheila's legs were still modestly hidden beneath her outer
garments
at that moment.
"Whilst I was
dancing with her last night, if you must know," Townley
replied, divulging only a part of the truth.
"I see,"
sighed Geraldine, and a slightly-pained expression crossed her face. For she had hoped that
Meanwhile,
however,
it was her father who appeared to be getting
what he
wanted from the two young women on either side of him.
Evidently his wants were not as exigent as
Geraldine's but, nonetheless, they were of a sufficiently sensuous
nature to be
of some concern to Timothy, who watched, with growing resentment, the
liberal
caresses Lord Handon was permitting
himself at Sarah's
expense. For his right hand had now
slipped under her dress and was more intimately exploring the opera
singer's
rear, gliding backwards and forwards across what appeared to be the
very same
pair of panties which Timothy had had the privilege of removing only
the night
before. However, to the latter's relief,
Sarah must have realized that Lord Handon
was taking
extra liberties with her, and decided there and then to put a stop to
it. For the hand that wasn't wrapped around
his
waist suddenly came to the rescue of her modesty and set about
restoring the
dress to its former, more orthodox position, thereby obliging her
assailant to
adopt a less intimate caress again. In
fact, Timothy almost heaved a sigh of relief at this point, but,
realizing that
Geraldine's attention was partly on him, he checked the impulse to do
so at the
last moment and endeavoured to fake a light-hearted smile instead, as
though
the proceedings farther afield were only
of humorous
interest. If Geraldine saw through him,
too bad!
"It looks as if our
little peep-show is about to come to an end," Townley
remarked, a shade disappointedly.
"So it does,"
Geraldine confirmed. For the arms of the
two young women on the bridge had now dropped to their sides, as Lord Handon turned away from the parapet and began to
walk
towards the couple to his left.
"They'll be coming
in our direction now, won't they?" Gowling
surmised at the top of his whispering voice.
And, sure enough, the
other group was leaving the bridge and heading towards the beaten path
on which
they were still standing, as though locked in suspended animation.
"I feel like
turning back," Timothy confessed, in the throes of a momentary panic.
"Don't be such a
bloody fool!" cried Geraldine.
"They'll be expecting us to bump into them shortly in any case,
so
we must go on. But when we do meet them,
try not to look guilty or amused.
Otherwise they're bound to realize that we've been spying on
them. Try, if anything, to look surprised."
"What, you
here?" joked Townley, smiling.
"Yes, something of
the sort," Geraldine smilingly agreed, as they continued along the path
and thence out into the less thickly-populated stretch of wood beyond.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The
drive
back to
Their conversation
became more desultory, however, as the
drive wore on,
and had virtually petered-out by the time they reached the outskirts of
Arrived home, Timothy
immediately set about preparing himself some supper.
He hadn't eaten since lunch and, as it was
nearly
Timothy ate supper in
the kitchen of his four-roomed flat. He
was both pleased and relieved to be back from what, for him, had been
an
unprecedented experience. But, by God,
how small everything seemed! The kitchen
looked ten times smaller than usual - more a cupboard than a room. And what applied to the kitchen would
doubtless apply to each of his other rooms as well - all cupboards! To be sure, the difference in scale from the
rooms at Rothermore House was indeed
tremendous, more
tremendous than he would have been capable of contemplating had he
never set
foot in the place. It was almost a
comedown being back home again. A comedown? How quickly the aristocratic criteria of Lord
Handon's stuffy old baroque mansion had
left their
mark on him, influencing his soul in a way he would ordinarily have
considered
pernicious or misguided! No, not so much
a comedown, the rational part of his mind now told him, as a radical
change-of-scale. But isn't that more to
your liking?
Ah yes, there at last
was the philosophical part of his psyche reasserting itself again,
reminding
him of who he was and what he believed in as a person.
It was coming to his rescue, coming to combat
the pernicious influence of his recent misguided experiences. That old Nietzschean
'transvaluation of all values' was making
its voice
heard above the babble of contradictory feelings and impressions once
more. He could hear it quite clearly
now, as he sat in front of his mug of steaming coffee and plate of
cheese-and-tomato
sandwiches. Calm, reassuring,
methodical, a reassertion of his customary values.... No, it wasn't a
comedown
to be sitting back here in one's tiny kitchen after the materialistic
opulence
and expansiveness of Rothermore House. On the contrary, one had simply returned to
one's own more evolved level, a level in which materialism was
scaled-down, as
it were, to a bare minimum. One had
returned to the late-twentieth century again, to a world of flats and
small
city houses. It was a very different
world from the old aristocratic one of large country mansions. And faced with a choice between living in a
small flat or a large mansion, one could hardly be blamed for coming
down
heavily in favour of the former. One
simply followed one's logic until it attained to a realization of the
fact that
one was closer to the Holy Ghost by living in a flat or small-city
house than
ever one would be in a large country mansion.
Not a great deal closer perhaps. But still, on a higher level of evolution than the
person
surrounded by nature on some country estate.
One was morally better off, and that was
worth knowing. Such was the way, at
any
rate, that Timothy Byrne looked at life, and he was confident that
there were
plenty of others who would be just as capable of looking at it from a
similarly
objective viewpoint - objective, that is, in terms of the Holy Ghost
and the
struggle for inner truth.
He
smiled to himself as he swallowed the last mouthful of
sandwich. In his mind's eye he saw the
stern, rather embittered face of Lady Handon,
as
she
disagreed with his concept of the Diabolic, saying: 'I really cannot
reconcile
myself to your attitude towards the stars and nature.'
Ah well, too bad, Lady Pamela, too bad! We
don't
all live on the same evolutionary
level, after all. Some of us virtually
live in the Middle Ages, some in pagan
times, others
even aspire, if that's the right word, to the primeval, and yet others
live in
a mixture or combination of them all.
But then, of course, some live more up-to-date - in fact as far
up-to-date as the last quarter of the twentieth century.
A few are effectively spiritual leaders and
consequently expressive of viewpoints which may well sound strange to
those who
lag behind. And the further they lag
behind, the stranger these viewpoints are likely to sound.
A genuine pagan would have been even less
disposed to accept Timothy's views of the stars and nature than Lady Handon. Fortunately,
however,
genuine
pagans were few-and-far-between these days.
Evolution was against them. It
disliked laggards.
Yet what of the spiritual leaders?
Was evolution encouraging them as much as it
could, and, if so, had Timothy Byrne a right to consider himself
blessed with the privilege of such leadership?
Yes, he liked to think so - at least as far as his thinking, his
theories, were concerned. Naturally
there would be those who, when once they read his latest published
work, would
be only too ready to consider him mad or bad, or both.
But so what?
Did that prove he really was? In
all probability their thinking - assuming they thought anything at all
- was
simply at a lower stage of evolution and therefore indisposed them to
relate to
him. It was nothing to be surprised
at. There were millions of Lady Handons in the world, and what they thought was
usually little
more than what others had thought for them, and not generally the most
up-to-date or progressive people either!
Let them have their little grumble, if that was all they wanted. He would not be thrown off course by that,
but would stick to his intellectual guns and fire away at the body of
outmoded
tradition, of entrenched reaction and dogmatic denial.
And if, after all, he was
wrong and
could be proved so? Well, damn it, he
would still fire away for all he was worth and assert his thinking over
everyone
else's. It was his own life to do with
as he saw fit. And if he saw fit to
regard human evolution as a sort of struggle from diabolic alpha points
to a
divine omega point, from the stars to the Holy Spirit - well then, that
was his
affair and nothing could take it away from him, not even the combined
efforts
of all the Lady Handons in the world put
together. As long as he lived, his truth
lived with him. It was germane to him
and a reflection of his degree of evolutionary sophistication. He had a right to think of the Alpha in
diabolic terms, for he had gone so far in the contrary direction ...
that there
was no other reasonable possibility.
Willy-nilly, the Alpha is entitled to the respect accorded to
divinity
until the coming of the Omega shows it up and puts it in an immoral
light. For alpha and omega
are
incommensurate, and if there is to be an omega point, there can be no
continuing allegiance to the Alpha.
Self-realization necessarily excludes worship.
He finished off his last
cheese-and-tomato sandwich and gulped down the rest of his coffee. His new book was bound to cause some
disagreement or disapproval among people.
Good, let it impinge on the cobwebs of their conservative
thinking and
rouse their feelings a bit! God knows,
some of them needed to have their feelings roused, to be shocked out of
their
smug complacency! And if it stirred them
into writing him abusive or threatening letters, so be it!
He would bear his cross as best he could,
regardless. He wouldn't go along with
those who thought 'God's in His Heaven and all's right with the world.' The Devil was in its Hell all right, but, so
far as he was concerned, God had yet to be established in His or,
rather, its Heaven. Only
with
the
climax of evolution would man attain to God, in his opinion. Only with the transformation of spirit into holy spirit, transcendent and pure, would God
actually
become manifest in the Universe.
Thus Timothy saw himself
in the unique position of being a spiritual leader who was yet an
atheist, a
man of God who disbelieved in God's actual existence, preferring to
contend
that it was our duty, as evolving beings, to create
ultimate
divinity in due course, to further the cause of divine truth in the
Universe by
cultivating the spirit as much as possible.
God, then, was the
culmination of evolution, the divine flower at the end of the stem of
human
progress, the climax of Eternal Life. By
cultivating the spirit Timothy believed that we were not so much
getting into contact
with God, contrary to what most mystics had hitherto imagined, as
simply with
that which, in pure consciousness, was potentially God - incipiently
divine. The spirit and the Holy Spirit
were not identical. For
the
latter
was destined to arise out of the former as it became
transcendent. As yet, however,
spirit was all too impure,
held back and down, as it were, by the flesh.
Some presumption, indeed, to equate this spirit with God!
With
supper out of the way, Timothy decided to call a halt to these
rather radical reflections and do some meditating before going to bed. He was quite tired now and anxious to make
up, in due course, for any sleep missed the previous night. Ah, how Sarah had drained him of physical
energy, or such of it as he had still possessed after the fatiguing
exertions
of their dancing match! A sexual
vampire, if ever there was one! But a
very beautiful woman, he had to admit. Too beautiful, in fact.
The kind of woman who could quickly drain one of spiritual
energy, too!
He switched off the
kitchen light and ambled across the passageway to his study, which was
where he
preferred to conduct his brief stints of Transcendental Meditation
these
days. The light was somewhat brighter in
there and quite dazzled him as it came on,
causing his
mostly paperback library to gleam back at him from the opposite wall. Ignoring that, he advanced towards his
dark-green notebook, which lay where he had left it on the desk beneath
the
study's single window, and, opening it at the page where he had made
his last
entry only a couple of days before, began to read:-
I
like
de Chardin's
phenomenology, or theory of cosmogenesis. In fact, it has had some influence on my own
work. But I'm rather sceptical about his
Christogenesis, especially with regard to a
literal
resurrection of Christ and the consequent inference of an
already-existent
Omega Point compounded, so to speak, of the spiritual presence of the
Risen
Christ. This would suggest the existence
of God, and I am unable to reconcile myself to it.
However, I do believe that, considered
figuratively, the Resurrection can be regarded as a symbolic
illustration of
man's future destiny in spiritual transcendence. Hence
the
Universe could be said to entail a
literal Christogenesis insofar as it is
man's destiny
to follow the symbolic example of the Risen Christ and ultimately
attain to the
Omega Point, attain, in other words, to the Holy Spirit, the climax of
evolution - call it what you will. But
as for Christ Himself, no, I can't for one moment believe that He
literally rose
from the dead and actually attained to the Omega Point two millennia
ago -
particularly in light of the fact that, even in this day and age, we
have such
a deplorably long way to go in developing our spiritual potential, and,
as a
corollary to that, in pairing back and eventually transcending the
natural,
ours no less than that pertaining to nature in general.
Timothy smiled to
himself in deference to the almost Nietzschean
implications of the latter part of the last sentence, before turning
back the
page of his notebook to a note written earlier that same day. It read:-
Like
Aldous Huxley, I am
opposed to downward self-transcendence but in favour of upward
self-transcendence. I believe the future
belongs to LSD or some such hallucinogenic alternative.
Increasingly we shall avail ourselves of the
synthetic, turning away from the natural, as from a narcotic plague.
And above it another
note, reading:-
They
say
that, like art, literature is dead, but this
isn't really so! Literature is simply
undergoing a process of transformation into a higher stage of
evolution,
becoming less a matter of illusion and more one of truth, like art. In this transitional age, the most advanced
literature is that which aspires most consistently and successfully
towards
truth or fact at the expense of illusion and fiction.
In this regard, the philosophical stands
above the autobiographical, the transpersonal above the personal. Hence novels like
He smiled to himself
once more, this time in response to a reflection on the shortcomings of
the
above note, which, while doing relative justice to conventional
bourgeois
literature, absolutely failed to embrace the extent to which computers
would
revolutionize literature in terms of an artificial conceptualism that,
in
relation to conceptual precedent, would be effectively superconceptual,
and proceeded to read the first note on the left-hand page, which was
strictly
autobiographical:-
I
am
incapable of writing inconsequential works -
novels which revel in silly fictions and half-baked illusions. If I do not write philosophical bombshells,
pushing the pursuit of truth to greater heights, I don't write at all. My imagination dries-up before mere
story-telling. It requires a worthier
task!
Ah, how true that
statement
was! He closed his notebook and stood a
moment staring blankly through the dark window, out into the night. He wasn't a petty man to waste valuable time
scribbling silly fictions! It was his
duty, he felt, to further the philosophically- and/or
autobiographically-biased
literature of late-twentieth-century man.... Admittedly, it was still
necessary
to commit a certain amount of illusion or fiction to paper, but one did
so
begrudgingly and sparingly, always with a view to supporting one's
philosophical bias. For if one was
foolish enough to allow it to swamp one's work, to move from the plane
of
foundations to that of the principal edifice, one simply produced poor
literature, that is to say, poor by late-twentieth-century standards -
reactionary or traditional, a literature seemingly in the service of
the
perceptual rather than standing on its own conceptual terms in
philosophical
opposition to the theatrical, whether anterior or, preferably,
posterior to
it. For the perceptual and the
conceptual were two quite separate ways of approaching life, and there
was no
sense in which the perceptual was inherently superior to the conceptual. On the contrary, it was a barbarous alpha,
not a civilized omega. The one stemmed
from dreams, the other could be said to presage meditation.
Absentmindedly, he
pulled the bright cotton curtains across the dark window and then
turned
towards the centre of his study. He
normally meditated sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, but
he
wasn't now sure that he really wanted to meditate, after all. Somehow the day had caught up with him,
making him too tired to adopt a positive attitude towards his spirit. He would run the risk of relapsing into a
kind of downward self-transcendence in trance-like stupor.
He could end-up experiencing his subconscious
mind rather than his superconscious one,
his
perceptual senses rather than his conceptual spirit.
No, he could do without that,
especially
after
his experiences of the last two days! He'd
had enough truck with the Diabolic Alpha
at Lord Handon's.
In a short while he would be sliding down into his subconscious
anyway,
to dream the devil-knew-what, so he might as well save himself the
inconvenience of premature subconscious domination in the study. After all, it was the noblest of his four
rooms, the one most suited to the cultivation of spirit.
It wouldn't do to fall asleep there! God
knows,
it was difficult enough to
cultivate spirit at the best of times, what with all the diurnal
occupations
and obligations with which one had to contend.
Even more difficult when one lived in an environment, as Timothy
used to
do, in which dogs were gruffly barking most of the time.
Hellishly so!
Fortunately, however,
all he now had to contend with was tiredness, yet that was more than
enough! He decided, there and then, to
take himself off to bed and make-up for this spiritual lapse some other
time -
perhaps the following day. Then he might
be in a better frame-of-mind to cultivate the godly and aspire towards
transcendent spirit.
And, sure enough, the
following evening he set aside half-an-hour for the objective in
question. As a rule, he preferred the
evening to the
day because, to him, it was a less evil time, the sun having its
primary
influence on the opposite side of the globe.
The evening world was accordingly at the farthest physical
remove from
the Diabolic Alpha, and thus it was easier, he believed, to aspire
towards the
Divine Omega then than at any other time.
Aspire, yes! But not attain to
it! For there was an immense difference,
he felt obliged to remind himself, between spirit and holy spirit,
between that
which was potentially God and the actual transcendent establishment of
God in
due course. To underestimate this could
prove fatal. He had no intentions of
doing so!
Yet he got a surprise
that evening. For no sooner had he
completed his meditation routine and begun listening to some synth-based music than the telephone rang, and
who should
it be but Sarah Field! He almost jumped
out of his skin at the clear sound of her voice, sweetly alluring as
ever. Had he got over his visit to Rothermore House?
Yes, he had. Was he happy to be back home? Yes, he
was. Had he decided what he would say at
the
"I'll come and see
you, if you like," Sarah replied.
"I'd love to see your flat."
"Oh, you would,
would you?" (Gentle laughter at Sarah's end of the
line.) "Well, in that case, Tuesday will be fine."
CHAPTER
NINE
Tuesday
evening
was in fact when Sarah arrived, looking like
a beauty queen - or so it seemed to Timothy's
overwrought imagination - and bringing a recording of Massenet's
Werther,
which
she wanted him to hear because she was
on it.
"I know you're
familiar with the work itself," she stated, as he took the slender
box-set
in his eager hands. "But since it's
the only recording I've so far made in French, it may prove of some
fresh
interest to you."
"Decidèment," Timothy smilingly assured her. "We'll put it on straightaway."
"Please don't feel
under any obligation to," said Sarah, following him into his
sitting-room. "I mean, you needn't
play it just because I'm here." But
Timothy seemed resolved on playing it now, and so she was obliged to
let
him. "Ah, what a nice room this
is!" she enthused, while taking off her coat. Underneath
she
wore a pale-green satin
miniskirt with black nylon stockings and matching high-heels. Her dark hair hung down her back in a plaited
ponytail.
"Yes," Timothy
agreed. "It's where I like to
relax." Although, with the
ravishing proximity of Sarah Field in front of him at that moment, he
felt
anything but relaxed! In fact, her image
had played on his mind throughout the past few days, keying him up for
the
present. He could hardly be blamed
therefore if, no sooner than he had set side one of Werther
in motion, he took
her in his arms and lovingly applied his mouth to hers.
To his gratification,
she responded warmly, enabling him to unzip her skirt and run his hands
over
her ample behind, as though to erase the imprint of Lord Handon's
liberties there the week before. It
seemed that she, too, was keen to explore the pleasures of the senses. For her hand took care of his zip shortly
afterwards.
"Are you going to
let me open your purse again?" he teasingly inquired of her.
Purse?" she
queried, wrinkling-up her brows in feigned puzzlement.
"You know," he
smiled, still teasing.
A knowing blush suffused
her cheeks. "Provided you put
something rich into it," she joked.
He needed no further
encouragement on that score but lifted her off her feet and set about
the task
to-hand, removing her tiny nylon panties with one hand and freeing his
already-erect penis with the other. In
the background, so to speak, the disc was well under way, but now that
he was
succumbing to the physical enticements of Sarah's moist 'purse', it
meant
little or nothing to him. He was quite
familiar with the libretto anyway, and preferred not to hear certain
parts of
it again - for instance, the lines sung by Werther
in
Act One, which went:-
O nature
enivre-moi
de parfums.
Mère eternellment
jeune, adorable et
pure!
O nature!...
Et, soleil,
viens m'inonder
de tes rayons!
and
clashed violently with his own philosophical
viewpoint concerning nature and the sun.
No, he could certainly do without that,
even
though it was something of a pleasure to hear the voice of Sarah
following on
behind, in her role as
But the opera singer's
body was more interesting to him now than her voice and, since he
hadn't had
much tangible sex these past few years, he was keen to satisfy his
needs in
some measure, to redress the balance slightly or, at any rate, pay some
dues to
the world, as it were, for being a man rather than a god.
Besides, he had become slightly less theocratic
and correspondingly more democratic off late, which made coitus
virtually de
rigueur.
Yes, he put something
rich into her empty 'purse' all right, filling it up with tiny pearls
of
glistening sperm the making of which caused her to squirm in an ecstasy
of
sensual delight and expend her wealth in due course.
Oh, she clung to him like a leech, draining
every last drop of the precious deposit from him, as though her very
life
depended upon it. But then, all of a
sudden,
it was over, and he withdrew from her with the rapidity of a passing
tornado,
leaving her ravished form to topple to the carpet just in front of the
electric
fire. He had filled her 'purse' all
right, but what if she became pregnant?
Would he marry her? Would he be capable of living with an opera singer - he,
a man of
the spirit? He turned towards her
and said: "Sarah, supposing you become
pregnant
...?" But the words sounded hollow
and he immediately regretted it.
Somehow, one shouldn't ask such embarrassing questions!
Yet, to his surprise,
she calmly answered: "I take the pill, Tim."
The
pill? Ah, yes!
Why hadn't it occurred to him? She
wouldn't have allowed him to have his way
with her otherwise, not with her professional life to consider and the
fact
that they had only known each other less than a week - since last
Thursday, in
fact. No, of course not!
How stupid of him to panic.
"Would you rather I
became pregnant, then?" she asked, to his further surprise.
"Well ..." and
he hesitated, wondering how best to answer.
For, in a sense, he would, since he had put so much effort into
satisfying their mutual desires. It
seemed a waste of energy that she was defeating his sperm with the pill. A futile, not to say
gratuitous, undertaking. But, on
the other hand, he hadn't known her long enough to be confident that
she would
make a good wife; wasn't absolutely convinced that it would be in their
mutual
interests to embark upon the hazardous course of raising a family.
Naturally he was pretty
keen on her, might even have fallen in love with her in his own offhand
way,
and couldn't pretend that he didn't want to get married some day. But whether to this particular woman ... that
was something he couldn't very well tell at present.
All he knew for sure was that he didn't want
to rush into anything prematurely, like he risked doing this evening. He did, however, want to make some woman
pregnant sooner or later, to have a son or a daughter and thus play a
part, no
matter how small, in keeping the human race going.
For it was only through propagation that
humanity could continue to evolve and one day attain to the climax of
evolution, only through reproducing itself that it could eventually
attain to
transcendent spirit. His son or daughter
would be chronologically closer to this long-awaited consummation of
evolution
than himself, and that was worth knowing.
The heavenly Beyond was our goal all right, but we couldn't get
to it
without reproducing ourselves en
route. Willy-nilly, propagation was a
must....
"Well," he said again, "I suppose I'd like you to become pregnant
eventually, but I've no desire to rush you into anything."
In fact, this was said in spite of himself,
in order not to hurt her feelings. For he still wasn't absolutely sure that he, personally,
would want
to make her pregnant.
Sarah smiled understandingly
and put her arms around his waist.
"I wouldn't allow you to rush me into anything," she softly
assured him.
"But if I really
wanted to give you a child?" he remarked.
"I'd probably allow
you to," she responded.
Timothy was visibly
surprised. "Just like that?"
he sceptically asked.
"Yes, because it's
better that way, better to have a child by a man who really wants to
give you
one ... than by someone you have to coax it out of, like he's afraid of
the
consequences or something," Sarah replied.
"But
what about your opera career?"
Sarah frowned slightly
and closed her eyes a moment, before saying: "It could wait."
"Wait?"
"Oh, don't think I
don't love singing," she assured him.
"But if I could love a man more, then my career would have to
take second
place."
"You wouldn't
consider it a waste of your professional time then, having a child?" he
conjectured sceptically.
"Not if the man was
worthy of my love," she confirmed, smiling. "A woman first and
foremost, a singer secondly."
"Even
if you were on the verge of world fame?"
Again Sarah hesitated a
moment before replying, turning her face towards the electric fire as
though to
gather strength from its bright orange filaments. "Yes,
even
then," she said,
swallowing hard.
Timothy was indeed surprised! He had never been in such a seemingly
privileged position before. It was
almost disconcerting to hear her admit such a thing.
Enough to make one feel
guilty. "And you consider me
worth sacrificing your career for?" he tentatively and almost bashfully
inquired of her.
She sat up beside him
and placed a tender kiss on his nearest cheek, saying: "Yes, Tim, I
do. For a while, at
least."
Automatically
he
reciprocated her tenderness, then said: "I'd
have thought there were plenty of other men just as worthy of your love
with
whom you come into regular contact on the opera stage."
"Not at
present," she confessed, offering him a slightly forlorn glance. "One comes into professional contact
with plenty of men, admittedly. Yet
they're often unsuitable or otherwise engaged at the time.
Indeed, you'd be surprised how lonely an
opera singer can be! We spend most of
our time singing about love and romance, but we're not necessarily
experiencing
what we sing. It's mostly just an act,
you know. And sometimes a rather
difficult one, too.... But don't let me burden you with my problems. Suffice it to say that at present I don't
know of another man whom I'd be prepared to sacrifice my career for,
and that's
a good enough reason to be on the pill."
She smiled reassuringly but without parting her lips,
withholding from
him that sparkle of teeth to which he had become gratefully accustomed. "By the way," she added,
"you're not opposed to the pill, are you?"
"No, although I'm
aware it can entail certain physical inconveniences and lead to a
variety of
psychological hang-ups," Timothy replied.
"But, fundamentally, I think it's a good thing, even if it might
be
improved upon in the course of time. It
makes for greater sexual freedom, at any rate."
"Freedom from
unnecessary or unwanted accidents," Sarah confirmed, smiling. "More sexual liberty and a safeguard
against rape - assuming one should ever have the misfortune to be
raped."
"Ah, I see your
point," Timothy admitted, blushing faintly. "It's
a
rather pessimistic thought, but
I suppose you'd feel more confident being out alone in the dark or
stuck in a
lift with some male stranger, if you were on the pill."
"Certainly as far
as pregnancy is concerned," Sarah conceded. "But
then
there would always be the risk
of venereal disease."
"An unsavoury subject!"
Timothy declared, wincing at the thought of it.
"However, in getting back to the advantages of being on the
pill,
let's just remember it gives us more control over nature, and that's
something
we need to get as much control over as possible. Nature
is
fundamentally evil, since torn
between the earth's molten core and the sun.
Therefore if we can regulate our sexuality
so that we
don't invariably fall into its predatory trap, so much the better!"
"I recall your
anti-natural sentiments in the drawing-room at Rothermore
House," Sarah confessed. "Not
to mention Lady Pamela's opposition to them.
She would undoubtedly be against the pill."
"Yes, though
probably not against condoms," Timothy opined. "However,
she's
well past the age of
having to worry about pregnancy, so I dare say that contraception of
any
description would be of little interest to her.
Geraldine would be the person for whom contraception has
particular
significance."
"Especially where
"Absolutely!"
concurred Timothy, as the thought of that suddenly evoked the memory of
their
walk around the grounds of Rothermore
House, the previous
Friday morning, during which time Geraldine had made a variety of
flirtatious
claims upon poor Gowling's sensibilities. Yet it also evoked a less amusing memory,
which was the spectacle of Joseph Handon
standing on
the wooden bridge with the arms of Sheila and Sarah draped about his
waist and
his hands on their respective behinds.
In the excitement of Sarah's arrival at his flat this evening,
Timothy
had quite forgotten about the episode in question, which had caused him
more
than a little uncertainty over the weekend.
Since the subsequent events at Rothermore
House had taught him nothing further about it, he was still in some
doubt as to
its actual significance, even with Sarah beside him.
But he couldn't very well question her now,
and thus betray the fact that, together with the other members of his
group, he
had been watching the goings-on from a discreet distance.
That simply wouldn't do at all! No,
he would just have to keep it to himself
and hope for the best, hope, in other words, that Lord 'handy' Handon hadn't begun a private affair with Sarah
behind his
back. It seemed unlikely, but, all the
same, one couldn't be absolutely sure - not when she had the pill to
safeguard
her freedom!
"Have you
personally ever used sex aids?" she asked, startling Timothy out of his
morose reflections.
"Sex aids?" he
gasped, unsure of exactly what she meant.
"You know, special
ribbed condoms or flashy little rubber gadgets that fit onto your cock
and
provide the participants with an extra thrill or two."
The writer laughed
impulsively and shook his head.
"Alas, no!" he confessed.
"But I do believe in them, though."
"You
do?"
"Yes,
I believe in anything that makes sex a less purely
natural affair. It attests to a higher
level of civilization, this inclination to bring synthetics or whatever
to bear
on sex. For the further civilization
evolves, the more power it must gain over nature. The
highest
civilization would be that which
was most anti-natural and therefore synthetic.
Contemporary civilization hasn't as yet attained to the highest
possible
peak of synthetic excellence, by any means!
Nevertheless, the growth of such industries
as you
allude to is a good thing, and should be encouraged."
"You frighten me a
little," said Sarah, frowning apologetically.
"You needn't
be," Timothy assured her.
"But isn't it
mostly just commercial exploitation, this outpouring of sexual aids and
stimulants?"
"No, it's not just
that, it's also civilization - higher civilization, as I've said. And if we continue to evolve, as we should
do, then you can be pretty certain that the use of synthetic aids will
become
more widespread and their construction correspondingly more efficacious. Sex as an art rather than
simply a utilitarian obligation.
Sex spiritualized through film and disc.
Sex elevated through sophisticated gadgets.
And eventually perhaps, as we become ever
more civilized, actual sex phased-out of society and replaced by
sublimated
sex, in order that we may concentrate more thoroughly on attaining to
the Omega
Point, the culmination of evolution."
"But how would we
reproduce ourselves?" Sarah queried, her regard turning sharply
quizzical.
"By artificial
means," said Timothy confidently.
"Very Brave
"Oh,
absolutely! We would enter this
world through science rather than sex, and thus get off to a better
start,
morally speaking. We would thereby be
able to take our spiritual aspirations more seriously, since we'd no
longer be
semi-animals with beast-like passions."
"You frighten me
again."
"Ah, don't
worry! This isn't likely to happen
overnight. Evolution is a tremendously
long
process, after all, and we have only comparatively recently begun to
embark
upon the sublimation of sex on a widespread, not to say wide-ranging,
basis,
thanks in large measure to the development of photography.
There's still a great deal of literal sex in
society, which will doubtless continue to be the case for some time to
come. Yet even sublimated sex must
eventually be outgrown, so to speak, as we concentrate more exclusively
on the
cultivation of spirit. You won't attain
to God by sitting in front of a sex video for hours on end, you know. But unless you do elevate sex from the body
to the mind, as it were, you'll always be stuck with it in the body,
world
without fucking end, and no transcendence will be possible."
"No, I suppose not,"
Sarah wearily conceded. For, in truth,
she found all this somewhat too futuristic and speculative for her
liking, and
was quite surprised that Timothy looked upon it with such evident
relish. But he was, after all, a man of
spiritual
foresight, a genuine intellectual leader, so what he said had to be
taken
seriously to some extent. It was no use
pretending that he was a fool or dupe of his own illusions. He spoke with a certain moral authority born,
no doubt, of premeditated deliberation.
Which was evidently what people like
Lady Handon found so disagreeable about
him. "And do you believe that we'll stand
a
better chance of attaining to God through the aid of test-tubes,
artificial
insemination, sperm banks, et cetera, than otherwise?" she asked him in
due course.
"I do," he
confidently replied, "since one only stands a chance of transcending
the
body, in my opinion, by cultivating the spirit as much as possible. So long as we come into this world via the
flesh, we shall always be its slaves.
However, don't forget that this transcendental hope only applies
to
people in the future, not to us personally.
I have no illusion that I'll personally attain to ultimate
divinity,
especially after a bout of sensual gratification like we've shared this
evening! The transformation from mundane
spirit to transcendent spirit is the culmination of evolution, as I've
already
said, and that would be an exclusively heavenly phenomenon, so that the
highest
civilization just prior to it would probably be composed entirely of
men or,
rather, supermen who had been programmed for spiritual transcendence
and
brought into this world through science.
After all, if you do away with sex, of what
use are
women?"
Sarah was even more
surprised to hear this than what had preceded it, and duly opened her
mouth in
astonishment. "A society without
women?" she exclaimed.
"One can imagine
science programming the sex of the test-tube babies," Timothy calmly
rejoined, "in order to minimize or preclude unnecessary sexual
distractions in the ultimate civilization.
I don't know ... it's simply speculation on my part. But I shouldn't be surprised if that or
something like it did
transpire to being the case.
For women would maintain fleshy temptations, and, frankly, you
can't be
ultra-spiritual and be tempted by the flesh at the same time! There would have to be one-way traffic
towards the Beyond, it seems to me, or nothing at all.
No homosexuality either, of
course."
"But, then, women
wouldn't be candidates for Heaven!" Sarah protested.
"Quite
so! The culmination of human
evolution would be a completely supermasculine
affair, eternity being entirely spiritual.
But women, it seems to me, are fundamentally appearance, not
essence,
and, as such, God isn't literally for them.
Their business is primarily to keep the species going until such
time as
they're no longer necessary, science having taken over.
They're a bit like the stars that shine-on in
the heavens and keep life going, but aren't destined for blissful
eternity
themselves. The stars will one day
perish, leaving the Universe to its ultimate perfection in God. And so, too, I believe, will women ...
considered in literally feminine as opposed to liberated terms. So, too, in a sense will men, since everybody
will be unisexually superhuman, if not
supra-human,
rather than human, and therefore the old dichotomy between men and
women will
cease to exist."
"Oh,
but that's terrible!" Sarah objected. "How
can you say such a thing?"
"It isn't terrible
really," Timothy countered.
"On the contrary, it would, if true, be right and just. Women of the unliberated
type I have in mind, who are mostly conventional in any case, wouldn't
want
Heaven, the Holy Spirit, or whatever you prefer to term this
hypothetical
culmination of evolution. They're what
they are, and that's all there is to it.
It's not as if they were being denied anything, if you see what
I
mean. What's essentially relevant to us
is fundamentally irrelevant to them.
There's no disgrace in that."
There then ensued a
thoughtful silence between Timothy and Sarah, during which the writer
moved
closer to the singer and put an arm around her waist.
Then he kissed her tenderly on the cheek a
few times, sucking away the tears that were rolling down it. She looked weak and fragile at this moment,
but ever so loveable!
"Supposing you're
right," she at length stammered, turning her face fully towards him,
"supposing your speculations are valid, what right have I to love such
a
man as you, someone as clever as yourself?"
"Don't
talk like that!" Timothy reproved her,
frowning. For he had
indeed been pained by it. "I
may be exceptionally clever, but I'm not above women - at least
comparatively
liberated ones. Don't think that I
despise you, Sarah, I don't! But I do
know that men and women are fundamentally of different constitution,
and that
what's desirable for the one sex isn't necessarily desirable or indeed
possible
for the other - at least not in the case of the great generality of unliberated women, who remain fundamentally sexy
and,
hence, seductive, scorning spirituality in favour of maternal
ambitions, their
beauty commensurate with a worldly disposition or status."
He kissed her again and she smiled weakly
through the avalanche of tears that were now streaming down her face.
"I've been fed so
much crap all my life," she confessed, "that it rankles a bit when
one hears something which sounds like the truth! Perhaps
women
like me just aren't
constitutionally qualified to bear it?"
"Possibly not
ultimate truth," Timothy conceded.
"But you are constitutionally qualified to bear children, and if
..." he hesitated on the verge of continuing. For
it
came as quite a shock to him, this
thought which had suddenly welled-up in his mind, like a water-bubble
rising to
the surface. Had he changed his mind
then, or come to a final decision?
"Yes?" Sarah
pressed him.
"Well, if you ever
wanted to bear a child of mine, I'd be more than happy to give you
one." The words were out of his
mouth before he had quite realized exactly what he was saying.
"You would?"
Sarah exclaimed, her face showing renewed signs of surprise and
astonishment.
"Yes."
"Serious?"
"Perfectly."
"But
when?"
He hesitated anew, not
sure how best to answer, then smiled and said: "As soon as you like."
"Oh but can you
really afford to?"
"Just
about."
"I see."
"And you'll marry
me?"
"Yes."
"Good, then that
settles it!"
"Are you quite
sure?"
"Positive!"
"Even
with your spiritual aspirations?"
He smiled wryly and
nodded his head, saying: "My dear lady, even if I were to dedicate the
rest of my life to celibacy and meditation and religious thought, I
doubt very
much that I'd attain to God. All that's too far into the future, so far as I'm
concerned. Besides, you wouldn't
unduly distract me from
my spiritual pursuits, would you?"
"I'd try not
to," Sarah promised, becoming noticeably embarrassed, as well she
might. "Although that isn't
entirely for me to decide, is it? But
... I'm not absolutely certain you love me in any case, so how can I be
sure
you mean what you say?"
"I do love
you," Timothy asserted.
"Really? Truly?" She looked at him suspiciously, almost
quizzically again.
"Well ..." But he
couldn't say that he really did.
"Aren't you simply
trying to mollify me, after what you said about God and women?" she
deduced.
He hadn't quite realized
how much he was doing that, but now, with her bright eyes fixed
firmly
upon him, it seemed unquestionably true.
He had simply taken pity on her and given way to a momentary
impulse of
reckless generosity. He didn't really
mean what he had said, and admitted as much with a regretful nod.
"Think carefully
before you come to a final decision where such important subjects as
love and
marriage are concerned!" Sarah sternly advised him.
"Yes,"
he said.
"I'm sorry." For he
realized that his speculations concerning the future had driven a wedge
of
bitterness between them and made her feel somewhat afraid and even
suspicious
of him. Admittedly, it had been callous
of him to say what he did. But it was
his nature to assert what he believed to be true irrespective of the
consequences, possibly because he habitually felt himself to be up
against so
many lies and falsehoods, so many things that ran contrary to his grain
...
that nothing short of a fanatical affirmation of what he believed in
would
suffice to sustain him in his individual struggle against collective
expedience, the artist against society, the outsider against tradition,
truth
against strength, idealism against materialism.
Perhaps that very fact rendered him constitutionally unfit to
live with
a woman? He didn't know, but he hoped
not anyway. After all, he had no real
desire to spend the rest of his life alone, a victim of his genius. Maybe, in due course, Sarah would get over her
little shock and come back to him again, emotionally speaking? Then, with any luck, they could get married
and start a family - assuming, of course, that he could love her enough
to
warrant their embarking on such a responsible undertaking, and that she
really
would be prepared to sacrifice her singing career for him.... Or would
it be
for herself? No, he didn't need to turn
cynical. And even if it would
be
self-interest on her part, so what?
Wouldn't that be a good enough reason to do so?
Yes, of course it would! He smiled
to himself and turned towards her
again, saying: "No hard feelings?"
"No," she
straightaway admitted, showing him a brief glimpse of sparkling white
teeth. "I'm rather grateful for
what we've done and said this evening.
You've enlightened me in certain respects."
"I
have?"
"Yes,
you've helped me to understand the age we live in and
the position of women in relation to it," she confirmed, "as well as
contributed towards unburdening me of some spiritual pretensions."
Timothy turned his face
away in embarrassment. "I hope that
won't prove to your detriment," he commented.
"No, I didn't have
all that many religious illusions anyway," she confessed.
"In fact, I had more or less worked out
the same ideas myself - intuitively, as it were. And
since
I don't meditate or practise yoga
..."
"Don't allow me to
deceive you into assuming that women have no business meditating,"
Timothy
interposed on a note of genuine concern.
"They have, even if they won't attain to God personally. At least, their children will profit not only
from their example and encouragement, but from whatever spiritual
inheritance
they may receive. For I'm convinced that
a child whose mother had regularly meditated ... would be more disposed
to
meditation, in later life, than one whose mother hadn't."
"You may be
right," Sarah conceded, nodding warily.
"Although I'm not particularly inclined towards meditation myself, so any child of ours wouldn't get much of
an example
from his mother. I have assumed, of
course,
that it would be a boy."
"Sarah, you needn't
think that I'd begrudge us a girl. Boy
or girl, they're both necessary to the future progress of humanity. Besides, if the truth were known, most men
would
probably prefer a daughter to a son in any case, if only to have an
extra
female about the house in later years."
"Forgive me,
I was being unkind to you."
There was a short pause
in their conversation before Timothy, realizing that side one of the Werther
album had lain silent for some time, suggested
they listen to the other side together.
"About this business of the
"Naturally. We mustn't disappoint poor Girish, after all."
"No, I
suppose not."
And with that said, they settled down to some additional opera
for the
remainder of the evening.
CHAPTER
TEN
Girish
O'Donnell sat upright in his
leather-upholstered swivel chair and frowned down at the letter in his
hand. His young secretary, a Miss Yogini Patel, stared anxiously at him across the
desk, pen
in hand and notebook on lap. She was
waiting for the oracle, as she regarded her boss, to dictate his next
remarks
with his usual spontaneity. But he
seemed to be rather chewing the cud, and this surprised her. What was going through his mind, she
wondered? Or was he simply re-reading
the letter? She coughed politely, as
though to remind him of her presence, and it appeared to have the
desired
effect. For he cleared his throat and,
without looking up, continued with his dictation from where he had so
mysteriously broken off:-
"....Although
we
appreciate your obvious concern relating to
the rather cramped nature of the booths, we cannot reasonably undertake
their
enlargement at present ... nor for that matter in the foreseeable
future
(STOP). Not only would it prove too
costly, but any alteration to the size of the booths would inevitably
lead to
the museum itself becoming too cramped (STOP).
Indeed, it could result in our having to dispense with a number
of
exhibits, which would not, we feel, be in either ours or the public's
best
interests (STOP). So, much as we
sympathize with your problem, we are at present unable to adjust our
facilities
to suit you (STOP). We will, however,
bear your suggestion in mind should we ever be in a position to
implement it in
due course (STOP). In the meantime, I
hope you will not feel that you are being discriminated against (STOP
AND
CLOSE).
Having said which,
O'Donnell cast the letter to one side and, leaning back in his chair,
shook his
head from side to side in patent wonderment.
Never had he received such a complaint before and, in spite of
his own
fairly corpulent disposition, it quite amused him.
"Oh, the poor chump!" he cried,
grinning sarcastically from cheek to cheek.
"Twenty-four bloody stones to live with and more fat on his
bones
than you and I put together, Yogini. No wonder he couldn't fit into any of the
booths!"
"Dear me!"
tittered Miss Patel sympathetically.
"And he expected us
to modify the size of them in order to suit his bulk!" exclaimed the
"He must
be on the
stout side!" averred Miss Patel on a rising tide of tactful
understatement. "For
the booths are over a metre wide."
"They are
indeed," O'Donnell confirmed.
"So his width must be somewhat in excess of that."
At which point he rubbed the palm of his left
hand over his balding pate as though in astonishment, before leaning
forwards
across his desk. "It just goes to
show one never knows what kind of complaint to expect here," he
continued,
on a weary note. "Perhaps we'll
receive a letter from somebody who is too tall for the booths one of
these days
- somebody over seven feet."
"That wouldn't
surprise me," Miss Patel declared, as she made a slight adjustment to
the
position of the horn-rimmed spectacles which dangled precariously on
her
aquiline nose. "Assuming the
unfortunate person lacked the imagination or desire to get down on his
knees."
"Quite.
Now then, what else do we have
here?" He was just on the point of
picking up another letter from his desk when the switchboard operator
rang
through to inform him that there were two people in reception by the
names of
Mr Byrne and Miss Field to see him.
"Ah, good!" he responded enthusiastically. "Tell
them
I'll be down
immediately." He slammed the
receiver back into place and stood up with a look of undisguised relief
on his
clean-shaven face. They had come to his
rescue in the nick of time! He'd had
enough of dictating letters for one day, quite enough!
So he dismissed Miss Patel without delay and
hurried along, as best he could, the third-floor corridor to the
stairs, the
lift being temporarily out-of-order.
Downstairs, a lot of
people were milling around or queuing to pay their entrance fees in the
reception area, but Mr O'Donnell quickly caught sight of his guests and
approached them with a welcoming smile on his face.
"So glad you could come," he
announced, stretching out a ringless right
hand with
which he shook each of their shaking hands in turn.
"It's a pleasure to
be here," said Sarah, more from politeness than actual experience. She was wearing a black raincoat with the rim
of a beige skirt showing beneath it and a pair of maroon stockings. For his part, Timothy was dressed in what he
liked to think of as one of his more radically theocratic outfits, with
his
favourite jeans tucked into a pair of white boots to balance out the
centripetal bias of the waist and cuffs of his hooded zipper, which, on
a day
like today, was a match for any wet or windy inclemency the weather
might hurl
at one. He looked every inch the
thinking individual beside the dark-suited figure of Girish
O'Donnell who, in concluding the formalities, inquired whether they
would
prefer to tour the museum first and record their voices later, or vice
versa.
"I think we'd like
to tour the museum first," Timothy replied for both Sarah and himself.
"Excellent, that
suits me fine!" the director averred, and without further ado he
immediately began to lead the way along to their left in the direction
of the
nearest room, which happened to be the British one.
"By the way," he added, as they
came to a halt on its threshold, "you'll probably have an opportunity
to
meet Joe Handon later this afternoon,
since he
usually comes in on Thursdays to attend to outstanding business and
have a chat
with me."
Sarah blushed violently
and Timothy opened his mouth in surprise.
"Oh?" he responded.
"Does Joe, er, I mean Lord Handon regularly come to town, then?"
"Of
course!" O'Donnell declared.
"He attends the Lords not infrequently in his capacity as a
Labour
Peer, and has a town house in
"Yes, I've heard
about his sporting preferences," Timothy admitted with a grimace,
wondering whether the possession of a
"Right
then, let's get on with our tour, shall we?"
O'Donnell suggested, and he pushed open the swing door that led into
the British
Room.
Obediently,
Sarah
and Timothy followed on behind the portly
figure of Mr O'Donnell and entered a medium-sized rectangular room in
which
five rows of transparent booths, rather reminiscent of telephone
kiosks, stood in
almost regimental formation facing and backing onto one another at a
distance
of about four yards. There were ten such
booths in each row, making for a total of some fifty in all, and they
stood
just over a yard apart, with a sufficiency of space in-between to allow
their
doors to slide back from their fronts on specially-designed rails. The initial impression they made on each of
O'Donnell's guests was, to say the least, pretty bizarre, and Timothy,
in
particular, was unable to prevent an amused response from distorting
his facial
features. It was really quite beyond his
wildest expectations! And the sight of
people standing in several of the booths with concentrated expressions
on their
faces seemed to him even more bizarre!
Other visitors, however, were pacing backwards and forwards in
front of
booths or standing just outside them and reading information plaques. Some were even queuing to get into one. It was more than a little bewildering at
first!
"As
you'll probably recall from our discussion on the
subject at Rothermore House, the British
Room is
exclusively dedicated to regional dialects throughout the country,"
O'Donnell reminded them, adopting a more authoritative tone of voice,
"and
contains, in its fifty recordings, a fair cross-section of what this
island
produces. Unfortunately we don't possess
every possible dialect here, but the selection we've made is fairly
representative of all the principal cities and regions."
He led them across to the first booth on the
left of the entrance which, at that moment, happened to be in use, and
pointed
out the button one had to press in order to activate its sliding door. It was positioned towards the upper
right-hand corner of the information plaque, at approximately chest
height, and
was painted red in order to be conspicuous.
"Ordinarily a single depression of this button will activate the
door," he continued, "but whilst the booth is in use, as at present,
the button is programmed not to respond.
You can press it as much as you like ..." and here O'Donnell
demonstrated what he was saying by giving the button three vigorous
presses
"... but nothing will happen. Only
once the recording has run its preordained course, and the door slides
open
again, does it come back into use. This
of course prevents anyone from disturbing the occupant of the booth."
"How
very ingenious!" cried Sarah, with a suitably
appreciative smile.
"Therefore you not only have to wait until the recording has run
its course before you can get into the booth, you also have to wait
until it
has run its course before you can get out of the booth again?"
"Precisely,"
the
director confirmed. "This prevents
people from wandering
in-and-out at random, setting a recording in motion by a press of the
button
which, as you'll have gathered, is dual purpose, and then abandoning it
whilst
it's underway, like a naughty schoolboy playing knock-down-ginger, or
whatever
the ruddy expression is.... The fact that a majority of our visitors
tend to be
schoolchildren or youths makes it imperative for us to take such
precautions,
as I'm sure you can appreciate. However,
since the average recording only lasts 2-3 minutes, there isn't any
reason for
us to fear that visitors are going to be demonstrably inconvenienced
by, ah,
enforced confinement in a booth. If they
don't like the particular recording or voice to which they're
listening, they
won't have to put up with it for very long, will they? Besides, a perusal of the information plaque,
prior to entry, would leave one in no doubt as to the recording's
contents. If that proves boring, one is
under no obligation to proceed further.
It's as simple as that!"
Whilst O'Donnell was
saying this, the booth in front of which they were standing became
vacant, as
its former occupant - a tall, red-haired guy of vaguely Lawentian
appearance - ambled off down the row in search of other intriguing
recordings. Timothy and Sarah were thus
presented with an opportunity to 'sound out' this particular exhibit
for
themselves, though it was pretty clear, from the modest size of the
booth, that
they could only decently do so one at a time.
For his part, Timothy wasn't particularly keen to initiate
proceedings,
but Sarah, true to form, went ahead and pressed the button. "Don't run away," she playfully
remarked, just before the sliding door closed behind her.
"We won't,"
O'Donnell promised, with a reassuring smile. And, turning to Timothy,
he began
to add fresh information to what had already been imparted concerning
the
general layout of the booths and their physical construction. "We start here, in the first row, with
selected regional accents from the south of
Timothy had to laugh
outright at the mention of this and, emerging from the booth after her
short
spell with a Kent dialect, Sarah thought he was laughing at her. "Did I really look that funny in
there?" she asked in semi-rhetorical fashion.
"You looked
wonderful actually," Timothy reassured her, exaggerating.
"It was about someone else that I was
laughing." And he promised to tell
her O'Donnell's story later on. He
didn't, however, notice the elderly gentleman to his right who,
standing in
front of the fourth booth along, must have imagined himself to be the
target of
Timothy's amusement, and was now staring at him in a most uncivil
manner. No doubt, the old sod's hearing
was not what
it used to be!
Meanwhile Sarah had
quickly recovered from her moment's perplexity and duly remarked on the
high-quality sound coming from the stereo speakers.
"I heard every
"Good, then let's
proceed a little farther, shall we?" the director suggested, leading
them
past the offended grey-head and on towards the end of the row, where he
solemnly paused before the booth housing a West Country accent and
briefly
scanned its plaque. "This is one of
the room's most popular exhibits," he duly informed them, "and largely
because the voice talks of cider and Cornish cream.
Perhaps you'd like to give it a try,
Tim?"
The young writer
obligingly consented to the unenviable experience of two minutes aquatex claustrophobia with a dialect which was
largely
unintelligible or, at any rate, somewhat abstruse, and duly emerged,
when his
time was mercifully up, with a look of undisguised relief on his pallid
face. There had been a welter of 'oohs', 'ahs', and 'ers'
in
the
recording, but nothing especially educative.
He was at pains, initially, to conceal his disappointment. For he had no taste for
cider, and rarely allowed himself the boil-producing luxury of cream,
whatever
its provenance. It would have
been more to his liking had the anonymous and evidently half-witted
Cornish
voice droned-on about synthetic hallucinogens, or the virtues of upward
self-transcendence instead. But he
pretended, for O'Donnell's sake, to having been impressed by exhibit 10
and, as
soon as circumstances would allow, switched the conversation to the
mechanics of
the recordings. Was it fair to assume,
for instance, that each exhibit had been recorded a number of times on
any
particular tape, and that the recordings accordingly followed on one
behind the
other as the button was depressed?
"Yes, that's
approximately the case," O'Donnell replied, as he led the way past a
sleepy-looking attendant, who tacitly acknowledged him with a terse if
deferential nod of his capped head, and on into the next room. "Each time one presses the button and
the door slides open, the recording is automatically engaged," he went
on. "There are usually from between
20-30 duplicated recordings on each tape, and when a tape reaches the
end of
its length, it is automatically rewound by a self-regulating device so
as to be
ready to start all over again. With the
most popular recordings, the automatic rewind may be called into
operation as
many as five times a day."
"Five?" Sarah
and Timothy exclaimed together.
"Indeed!"
O'Donnell confirmed. "Although most
of the anonymous recordings are listened to no more than ten times a
day, which
means that the self-regulating device isn't called into operation all
that
often. As you can see here, for example,
the booths are scarcely overworked."
They were now standing
in the middle of the small appendage to the British Room, in which the
emphasis
was on class rather than dialect. To
left and right of them the booths, some twenty in all, were mostly
unoccupied,
though at least half-a-dozen people besides themselves were either
engaged in
scrutinizing information plaques or wandering lethargically from booth
to
booth. Every once in awhile a hint of
amusement or incredulity would appear on their faces, only to be
countered, in
due course, by fresh absorption in a plaque or total loss of interest
in its
contents. One old lady was heavily bent
over information relating to the cultivated
"The
"Oh, please
do!" Sarah urged him, and, since her companion had no desire to dally
any
longer in such a class-bound room, they at once set off for the Room of
the
Famous next-door. A herd of young
schoolboys exiting it at that moment prevented them, however, from
immediately
gaining access to its prized possessions via an unhampered entry. But as soon as the stampede had subsided,
O'Donnell proudly led the way through its twin doors into what was,
without
doubt, the most crowded of the ground-floor rooms.
"Phew!" gasped
Timothy at the sight of all the bodies buzzing around booths, like flies
around
jam pots. "This is more than a
little surprising!"
"To be sure,"
O'Donnell responded, smiling affably.
"But it becomes less so once you begin to familiarize yourself
with
the exhibits, which, to say the least, are of considerable interest. People come here from all over the world just
to visit this room and hear the voices of their literary or musical or
artistic
or cinematic heroes. And I have received
numerous letters congratulating me on the superb quality of the
recordings."
"So you don't get
only bad letters," said Sarah, with a mischievous smile.
"Oh no, the great
majority are good!" O'Donnell declared.
"If I gave you the contrary impression at Rothermore
House, it was only because Lady Pamela prefers to hear about the bad
ones. She thrives on scandal, you know. But don't let's discuss that now.
Let's take a look at what we have before us,
shall we?"
As in the British Room,
the booths here were arranged in rows backing or facing (depending on
your
viewpoint) onto one another at a distance of about four yards, the only
significant difference being that in this room the rows were twice as
long, so
that there were exactly a hundred exhibits from which to choose. The first row, they were informed, was
exclusively dedicated to literary people, the second to composers,
singers, and
artists, the third to film stars, the fourth to sportsmen, and the
fifth to a
miscellany of the famous, including politicians, clerics, scientists,
inventors, and soldiers. At a glance, it
wasn't easy to tell which row was attracting the most attention; for
there was
no shortage of attention in any of them.
But since there were more schoolboys standing in front of the
sportsmen's booths than actually standing in them, it soon became
apparent
that, as far as they
were
concerned,
the famous
sportsmen had a monopoly over everyone else - film stars not excepted!
The first row, however,
was more to Timothy's liking and, to his relief, it was along this that
O'Donnell led Sarah and himself, pointing out the various names en
route,
which included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Aldous
Huxley. A well-known photograph of the
writer was appended to the information plaque in each case, thereby
assisting
the visitor's memory recall the face of the man whose voice was stored
on tape. Unfortunately it wasn't possible
for Timothy
to study the plaques in any great detail, since O'Donnell was obviously
keen on
showing his guests around the museum as quickly as possible and on
showing them,
moreover, as much of it as possible, and so led the way past the booths
at a
fairly uniform pace. Only where the
Huxley booth was concerned, however, did the young writer make a
determined
effort to read the substance of the recording, his self-willed
absorption duly
obliging O'Donnell to terminate his advance a few yards farther along. For her part, Sarah halted beside Timothy and
peered over his shoulder at the plaque in question.
She didn't know all that much about Huxley
herself, and wasn't particularly interested in the information
concerning him,
but thought she might as well offer her fellow-guest a little
psychological
support.
"Ah yes, I thought
you'd be interested in that one," sighed O'Donnell, reluctantly
retracing
his steps until he was more or less level with the inquisitive pair. "You probably recall my telling you, at Rothermore House, about the highly critical
letter I
received from a senior churchman concerning Huxley's use of, ah, orientally-inspired terminology detrimental, so
it was
alleged, to our Christian integrity."
"Yes," Timothy
admitted, with a wry smile. "Are
you still intending to replace this recording with a less ...
controversial one
in due course?"
"I expect so.
Although, personally, I
don't have anything against it, and am quite convinced that a majority
of our
visitors wouldn't, either. After
all, what does it matter if Huxley says Clear Light of the Void instead
of the
Holy Spirit? They amount to
approximately the same thing, don't they?"
Timothy politely nodded
his head and said: "Except that the Holy Spirit obviously has more
relevance to those of us who respect the Christian tradition. I, for one, prefer the term 'spirit' to
'light', because it seems to me closer to the essence of ultimate
divinity,
which is transcendent spirit - pure, and hence holy, spirit. But, frankly, it doesn't make much difference
which term one uses, so long as one knows to what one is referring....
Curiously, a lot of people who turn to the Orient and adopt such
Buddhist terms
are unaware of the parallels which exist with Occidental religion. They mistakenly imagine that Christianity is
incapable of expanding beyond itself into a transcendental framework of
post-Christian mysticism. One has to
adopt Buddhism or Hinduism, in their misguided opinion, and take it
from
there."
"The cult of the
East," O'Donnell averred, nodding sagely.
"Now although there
are undoubtedly aspects of Eastern religion which are worth knowing
about and
taking seriously," Timothy rejoined, "there are also aspects of it
which are simply antiquated or misguided, and that's something Huxley
didn't
always emphasize. He took too many
Eastern illusions seriously, including, in my opinion, those relating
to
reincarnation. Not to mention a
posthumous merging with the Clear Light of the Void."
"You mean life
after death," suggested Sarah, who had the advantage over O'Donnell of
having been present in the drawing-room at Rothermore
House when Timothy first delivered his theological exposition, the
previous
week.
"Quite so!" he
confirmed. "I only believe in the
eternity of transcendent bliss which should result from the climax of
evolution, not in an already-established Heaven that exists either by
dint of
its own making or as a consequence of the spiritual contributions, as
it were,
of certain transcendentally precocious members of the human race,
including
Christ and the Buddha. Thus, for me, God
is something in the making, not an already-existent fact!"
"He's an atheist
who is yet in favour of God and is, to some extent, a man of God,"
Sarah
revealed, for O'Donnell's puzzled benefit.
"How
extraordinary!" exclaimed the director, raising his brows in manifest surprise.
"Perhaps you'll do us the honour of recording some of your
religious views later, when we get down to business."
"As a matter of
fact I have
prepared
a
reading along those
lines," Timothy revealed, blushing faintly in response to the
conservative
opposition he conjectured it would arouse.
"Excellent!"
O'Donnell enthused. "Then I shall
be delighted to hear it, since every advance in free thought is a
further nail
in the coffin of natural determinism and enslavement to the given." At which point he playfully slapped the
writer on the back and offered him an encouraging wink.
"Now what about you, Sarah?" he
asked, turning his attention to the smartly-dressed young opera singer. "Have you prepared your little speech as
well?"
"Indeed I
have!" she revealed enthusiastically, as though from psychological
contagion. "Although,
by contrast with Timothy's, it'll be largely autobiographical."
"Good, that suits
me fine!" The director hesitated a
moment, as if unsure what to say next, then, realizing that time was
slipping
by and the museum no more than part-toured, he suggested they continue
on their
way, which Timothy begrudgingly agreed to do, although he hadn't quite
read to
the end of the Huxley plaque and would have been grateful for the
opportunity
of listening to the great man's voice.
No doubt, such a heavenly experience could wait until another
time -
possibly after his own recording session. For it seemed that, despite his show of
hospitality, O'Donnell was unwilling to wait about outside, amid the
swirling
throng of noisy schoolchildren, while his guests amused themselves in
the booths.
However, Sarah was more
determined than Timothy to sate her curiosity where at least one
recording of
the famous was concerned, and accordingly insisted on their paying a
visit to
the Maria Callas booth in row two. As
luck would have it, the Callas was vacant at that moment, so she
immediately
pressed the button and betook herself to
the booth's
interior without bothering to scan the plaque first.
She evidently knew more or less what to
expect from the renowned singer's autobiographical sketch.
"A charming young
woman," O'Donnell opined, as soon as she was safely sealed off from
them.
"To be sure,"
Timothy agreed.
"And she sings so
perfectly, don't you think?"
"From what little
I've heard, yes, I do."
"Joe Handon
is rather fond of her, you know."
Timothy's face paid host
to another blush. "He is?" he
responded, feigning innocence as best he could.
"In what kind of way?"
"Oh, just
friendly," O'Donnell averred. "Playfully amorous.
Nothing serious, so far as I know."
"I see,"
sighed Timothy, whose voice sounded a shade embittered in spite of the
noble
endeavour he was making to conceal his personal interest.
"And is Sarah, er,
fond of him too?"
"That's something
you'll have to ask her, old man.... By the way, what did you think of
Geraldine
last week?" the director asked.
Timothy didn't know
quite what to think, but opted to reply: "She seemed quite pleasant. Why do you ask?"
"Oh,
just simple curiosity. Some
people take to her, others don't. I
myself think she's very attractive and intelligent with it. But, well, not everyone is of a like
persuasion."
"Like
"Possibly."
It was clear that
O'Donnell had no desire to expand on that, so Timothy said: "I must
confess to not having got on too well with her mother, though."
"No? But
then
a man of your intellectual cast
could hardly expect to, could he? She is
rather a bitch, I'll admit, which, between you and I, is one of the
reasons why
her husband is inclined to fish around a bit, as it were, for
alternative
company, if you follow me. He doesn't
get on too well with her, either.... Ah, here's Sarah again!"
The young opera star
emerged from the booth with a radiant smile across her face and
confessed, at
once, to having found the recording just to her taste.
"It was so nice to hear Callas speak for
a change," she said. "One
begins to understand the kind of fascination this museum must have for
people."
Its principal director
accepted her compliments graciously, before setting his guests under
way again,
around past the remaining booths in the second row and on through the
crowd of
schoolboys who thronged the narrow isle between the front of the third
and the
back of the fourth rows, past the glamorous dead film stars. "I told you at Rothermore
House that Marilyn Monroe's voice was very popular with young people,
didn't
I?" he joked, as they squeezed their way through a group of High School
students who queued impatiently for a chance to get into her booth. "One is trapped here between the Scylla
of sex and the Charybdis of violence. I should never have obliged you to traverse
this part of the room, so please forgive me." He
was
of course partly joking, but life was
rather
more tempestuous here, and Timothy reflected that the room could have
been
better arranged by having fewer rows and more space between them. Perhaps that was something for the future?
Once at the end of the
third row, however, they decided against braving the remaining two rows
but
continued on towards the far exit, which led to the lift and stairs to
the next
floor. There, as before, a solitary
attendant acknowledged them in passing, though he was less
sleepy-looking than
the one in the British Room.
"We
have an attendant on duty in each of the rooms, so as to
provide a kind of on-the-spot information service relating to the
layout of the
museum and simultaneously keep a watchful eye on things," O'Donnell
proudly revealed, as they began to climb the stairs.
"With so many schoolkids
about, one can't afford to take any chances."
"But
surely, if the booths are automatic and break-proof?" Timothy
objected, showing genuine puzzlement.
"Ah, it's not so
much the booths themselves as to what may happen inside or outside of
them
which prompts our concern," the director replied, leading his visitors
up
to the first floor. "Sometimes the
buttons are tampered with, for example, and the booths put out of order. We must have an attendant on duty to ensure
that, where possible, this doesn't happen.
He must also supervise the queuing and prevent people from
blocking the
isles or otherwise making a public nuisance of themselves - two things
which
the attendant in the room we have just passed through appears to have
neglected
today. And, of course, he must report
any malfunctioning of the booths to me personally, and ensure that the
casualty
of either public abuse or private breakdown is temporarily marked with
an
out-of-order sign - like, unfortunately, the one on the lift
downstairs, for
which my humble apologies. But there have
been one or two tasks thrust upon our attendants in recent weeks which,
I
regret to say, were most odious. I
refer, in particular, to the removal of a number of so-called stink
bombs which
were placed in various booths by, ah, certain delinquents whose sole
objective
was to cause any subsequent and unsuspecting visitor to them as much
nasal
inconvenience as possible!"
Timothy and Sarah
wrinkled-up their noses in manifest disgust and raised their brows in
horrified
amazement. "How
awful!" Sarah elected to exclaim with verbal relish.
"Especially if
you're unfortunate enough to get trapped with the pong for two minutes,
as I
believe happened to a couple of slow-reacting elderly people, who must
have
activated the stink bombs by standing on them," O'Donnell speculated. "By the time they realized what was
afoot, the sliding door had closed in their wake and they were obliged
to
endure the most excruciating nasal torment imaginable."
"Oh, Girish!"
protested
Sarah, making an emphatic grimace.
"Forgive me for
telling you," O'Donnell rejoined.
"But such irresponsible acts of callous delinquency might be far
more frequent, did we not take the precaution of placing an attendant
in each
of the rooms. His very presence there is
normally sufficient to deter most of the would-be villains from
pursuing their
vile intentions!"
They had reached the
first floor and thereupon proceeded, as before, through each of the
rooms in
quick succession, beginning with the Asian and continuing, via the
African, to
the European and South American rooms on the far side of the building. Here, too, the booths were laid-out in a
similar fashion to those on the ground floor, with approximately an
equal
number in each room. On the whole,
things were somewhat quieter than in the Room of the Famous, since the
voices
recorded here, being anonymous, held little interest for the majority
of
schoolchildren and were only sampled, as a rule, by people with a
special
interest in languages, which included a number of foreign visitors and
indigenous students. As Lady Handon had explained over dinner, the previous
week, one
could experience a wide selection of languages in the space of a few
minutes
or, at any rate, in fairly rapid succession, and this seemed to have a
distinct
appeal for some people.
On the evidence before
them the European Room was the most popular of the first-floor rooms,
attracting visitors not only from the Continent but from just about
every other
continent on earth as well, and as Timothy and Sarah passed through it
in
O'Donnell's corpulent wake they encountered a party of Japanese
tourists who,
to judge from their intent expressions, were experiencing considerable
pleasure
from listening to an assortment of European tongues.
In several of the booths, notably those
dedicated to Greek and German recordings, small sallow faces with
glittering
white teeth peered out at one in rapt amusement or stunned incredulity
at the
sounds they were hearing. A long queue
of Japanese had formed in front of the Russian booth, which, for some
reason,
seemed to intrigue them the most.
Amateur photographers trained their cameras here and there on
the
occupants of various booths, avid, no doubt, for a visual record of
this
extraordinary aural experience to take back home with them. It seemed that there was nothing comparable
in
O'Donnell smiled his way
through the rooms with mounting self-satisfaction, like a predator
taking stock
of his prey. Business was pretty good
today, he informed his guests, even though most of the overseas
Christmas
visitors had already gone home by now.
"Our busiest time is, of course, the summer," he continued, as
they passed through the remaining room, where a variety of South
American
dialects in Spanish and Portuguese or even a jumble of both was stocked. "Then we get literally thousands of
tourists here, especially during the peak period of July-August. After that, things begin to simmer down a
little
- at least as far as tourists are concerned.
For we have no shortage of schoolkids,
as
you've
seen. The only time we get a
break from them is, of course, during school holidays, when the
tourists take
over. Nevertheless life is never so busy
here as in July and August, when whole coach-loads of foreign visitors
descend
upon us like a plague of locusts, ravaging the booths one by one. Whether we shall fare as well in the future,
after this idea catches on elsewhere, remains to be seen.
However, now that we've got to the end of
this floor, let me introduce you to the rooms above."
And this he duly did,
starting with the Australasian Room, in which a cross-section of New
Zealand,
Tasmanian, and Australian dialects were housed, and continuing to the
North
American Room, where a variety of Canadian and US dialects awaited the
inquisitive
ear. "Americans are especially keen
on this room," he rather matter-of-factly informed them, as they ambled
between plaques bearing the subject-matter of the respective recordings. And, sure enough, a number of booths were at
that very moment occupied by visitors from the
"No, I guess
not," said Timothy out of politeness.
For he had never fallen victim to that
anyway. Even then, while they were
standing there, a
group of Americans could be heard talking in different accents. It was hardly necessary for one to venture
into
a booth, reflected Timothy, to hear a yank's voice!
However, O'Donnell,
himself partly of American extraction, had no intention of dallying
there any
longer, since he was determined that his companions should shortly get
on with
their own recordings, and so led the way beyond the North American Room
at
what, for him, was almost a gallop. The
next room was the smallest on the second floor, containing no more than
forty
booths arranged in four rows of ten, and was relatively quiet, with
just a
handful of people wandering around it.
Its recordings, O'Donnell informed them, were taken from several
of the
world's small islands, and were studies in both language and dialect. A black man, evidently of West Indian origin,
was listening to a Jamaican dialect as they passed through - the
recording
representative of
"Presumably this is
the Room of the Infamous you briefly mentioned at Rothermore
House," Sarah conjectured, as her eye caught the name 'Adolf
Hitler' printed in bold gothic type on the nearest of the information
plaques.
"Indeed it
is!" confirmed the director, nodding briefly. "Hitler,
Goebbels,
Himmler, Stalin, Mussolini
-
these are just a handful of the infamous people whose pre-recorded
voices we've
acquired for the public's benefit."
"I'm rather glad
these booths aren't functioning at present," declared Timothy, for whom
the room seemed, even at this stage, to have a certain malevolent
atmosphere
about it.
"One fancies that
Hitler's booth will get overworked," said Sarah, as they reached the
exit
door opposite and then stood waiting impatiently a moment whilst
O'Donnell
lustily thrust his key into its virgin lock.
"Yes, especially
where schoolkids are concerned," he
conceded,
with a wry smile.
Emerging safely on the
other side, they began to climb the stairs to the third floor. The guided tour, it appeared, had run its
maundering course and O'Donnell was now eager to lead them straight to
the
recording studio where, following some liquid refreshment, they could
get on
with their appointed tasks. The studio
in question was next-door to his secretary's office, to the left of the
stairs,
and contained a couple of soft chairs, a table, and some
expensive-looking
recording equipment. In all, a very
business-like little place with hardly enough room for more than a
couple of
people. Not a sound from the outside
world could be heard there. For the
walls, door, and windows had been thoroughly soundproofed, thereby
preventing
even the loudest external noise from interfering with the studio's
function. Outside in the corridor,
however, the clicking sounds of a variety of business machines,
including
typewriters, betrayed the administrative essence of the third floor. A few voices could also be heard from time to
time, but they were more remote, coming from the far end of the
corridor. Nearby, a coffee machine stood
idle, and it
was towards this that O'Donnell next led his prospective recording
stars,
offering to pay for their coffees himself.
"There's a WC just along there on your left," he informed
them, once they had accepted his offer, "so you needn't worry about
overloading yourselves."
"That's a
relief!" joked Timothy ironically, and, together, they sipped their
coffees in silence awhile, until O'Donnell, mindful of their real
purpose for
being there, suggested that a start be made on the recordings as soon
as
possible, since time was ticking by and there were other things for him
to
attend to that afternoon.
"I'll record you
one at a time," he added, after a short pause. "So
who's
first?"
"Ladies before
gentlemen," said Timothy in ironic deference to his companion, who, to
his
surprise, graciously accepted it.
"Good, then that
settles the matter," O'Donnell concluded.
"If you like, Tim, you can wait in the lounge opposite, where
you'll find a plentiful supply of educative reading matter. And if, by any chance, old Joe Handon shows up, he'll be sure to pop in and see
you, being
interested to hear what you think of our museum."
Sure enough, Lord Handon did show up, interrupting an article on
modern
sculpture upon which Timothy had duly engaged his reading fancy,
compliments of
the numerous arts magazines that, curiously for a museum of this
nature, lay
stacked up in the lounge.
"Delighted to see you again!" he averred, extending a bony
hand for the writer to shake. "I
trust you're now familiar with the layout of the place?"
"More or
less," Timothy admitted, smiling politely.
With handshake
completed, Lord Handon took a seat
opposite in one of
the leather armchairs there and proceeded to light himself a mild cigar. His light-grey suit complemented his hair,
just as his dark-blue tie matched his eyes.
There was a verbal silence while he puffed on the cigar, which
seemed to
take-up all his attention, before he got around to asking Timothy, in a
fairly
guarded tone-of-voice, whether his visit to Rothermore
House had been enjoyable?
"Oh, very much
so," the writer replied, succumbing to a degree of impulsive
overstatement
on the spur of the moment.
"Even with my wife
in flagrant opposition to your religious views?" Lord Handon
queried.
"In
spite of that."
"And in spite of my
house and grounds, I take it?"
"Well ..." It was awkward
for Timothy to admit as much outright; for there could be no doubt that
the
viscount had put two-and-two together in the meantime, and drawn the
relevant
conclusions.
"Perhaps you'd feel
less out-of-your-depth in my town house," Lord Handon
suggested, coming to his rescue. "I
shall be home next Wednesday evening, so if you've no prior
engagements, why
not come over and have dinner with us - my daughter and I, that is? I'd welcome a
further opportunity to discuss your latest theories with you, and
without
running the risk of upsetting my fiercely fundamentalist wife, who will
be down
in
The expression sounded
somewhat inept to Timothy, and the prospect of another visit to a Handon property not a little daunting. But, more from politeness than a genuine
desire to accept the invitation, he nodded his head and warmly thanked
his
prospective host.
"Not at all!"
the viscount responded, smiling reassuringly.
"It'll be a pleasure to have someone as enlightened and
intellectually precocious as yourself to talk to for a change. I get more than my share of conservative
bores and spineless lickspittles to dinner, believe me!
Especially from my own
age-group.... No, I like to hear the views of younger people,
even when
I can't personally relate to them.
Although I think I can relate to most of your religious views -
at least
up to a point. But we can discuss that
later. At the moment, I expect you're
anxious to get into the recording studio and put some of them down on
tape,
eh?"
"Yes, I guess
so," Timothy admitted. "Though
I'm also aware that whatever I say won't be heard by the public until
after my
death, which could be as many as 30-40 years hence."
"I
shouldn't let that bother you," Lord Handon
advised him, blowing smoke. "After all,
the essential thing is to
get your voice on tape at this stage in your career, in order that we
can have
a recording of you at thirty, or whatever it is. Later
recordings
would also follow. But if, by
ill-luck, something were to happen
to you in the meantime ... to cut your life short, we'd have this
recording
to-hand, and that's the important thing!
So it isn't really a futility for you to record now.... However,
let's
not be pessimistic. Let's rather assume
that you'll live to be a ripe old grey-head like myself, with three or
four
separate recordings behind you."
There
wasn't time, however, for Lord Handon
to say anything else. For the door
suddenly opened and a relieved Sarah Field burst into the room with a
broad
smile on her face. "Go on, Tim,
it's your turn!" she cried, holding the door open for him.
With scarcely-concealed misgivings he got to
his feet and reluctantly left her to the viscount, less because he had
come
ill-prepared for his recording than because he feared that Lord Handon would seek to renew his intimacies with
Sarah no
sooner than he was out of sight, and this worried him slightly.
However,
he
didn't let that interfere with his recording
obligations and, before long, he had knuckled down, under O'Donnell's
calm
guidance, to his appointed task, reading from the prepared document in
his
hands the basis for his current religious views and the fact that, for
him,
life really was a sort of struggle from the Devil to God, as from alpha
to
omega, which pitted the freedom of self-realization against the
enslavement to
worship. Not that one couldn't
distinguish,
he went on, between effectively divine and diabolic alternatives on the
alpha
plane, as it were, of traditional religion, since there was, after all,
a
distinction between what was believed to be the central star of the
Galaxy and
the sun, as between the central star and revolving stars in general. But pedantic distinctions of that order
notwithstanding, those who, through self-realization, aspired towards
the
Divine Omega, the ultimate level of divinity, were, willy-nilly,
obliged to
turn their back on the Alpha. In which
case it was just as well to debunkingly
lump both
alpha diabolic and divine together anyway, since they were equally
irrelevant
to an omega-oriented liberation, and clinging to the Divine Alpha, or
what was
taken for such, wouldn't assist the development of inner truth but, on
the
contrary, simply dilute and impede it ... in the name of power or
strength, the
'divine' virtue of the Alpha, with particular reference, in Timothy's
estimation, to the central star of the Galaxy, the cosmic source from
which,
wittingly or unwittingly, the power-based concept of 'The Almighty' had
been
extrapolated, as the more totalitarian of the early peoples moved from
the
stars in general to one star in particular and thus, effectively, from
centrifugal
polytheism to (relatively speaking) centripetal monotheism, the Many to
the
One, albeit still within the necessarily primitive framework of the
Alpha.
As to those who thought
fundamentalist theology had no basis in or connection with the Cosmos
at all,
said Timothy, by now considerably warming to his chosen subject, they
were
simply guilty of ignorance and superficiality, since religion was more
than
just a figment of the imagination, and it couldn't have survived had
not its
principal divine and diabolic protagonists been derived, through
theological
extrapolation, from cosmic sources - in Timothy's view, the Galaxy's
central
star and the sun.... Though that applied more to Old Testament
theology, he
maintained, than to Christianity, which, appertaining to the New
Testament, had
sought to accommodate a 'Son of God', namely Christ, and was thus less
cosmic
than humanistic, with, in all probability, a less-elevated alpha God,
namely
the Father, and a less-elevated alpha Devil, namely the Antichrist,
since no
cosmic contiguity could be inferred to exist between the central star
of the
Galaxy and the Earth, corresponding to the Mother, and consequently it
appeared
that Christian theology had been obliged to lower alpha divinity from
the
stellar to the solar plane - in reality, that of the Alpha Diabolic
from an
objective, or Judaic, standpoint - in order to accommodate the Earth
and thus,
by implication, a lunar Son, the moon always equivalent to a child in
relation
to 'Mother Earth'. At least this seemed,
on deeper reflection, the underlying implications of having a 'Son of
God'. Though Timothy was also aware that
Christianity had been obliged to accommodate the Father to the phallic
worship
of pagan precedent, the 'dark gods of the loins' in Lawrentian
parlance, in which case it seemed that the Blessed Trinity was less
alpha and
omega with a worldly, or humanistic, deity coming in-between ... than
co-existentially humanistic on the basis of phallus, heart, and mind,
or body,
soul, and spirit, with the Father symbolic of the body, Christ of the
soul, and
the Holy Ghost of the spirit, albeit a spirit that was less alpha or
omega than
humanistic and, hence, rather more consciously perceptual (fantasies)
and
conceptual (thoughts) than either subconsciously or superconsciously
extreme, as germane, so he contended, to that which, rooted in alpha
objectivity, had preceded the Christian civilization, and that which,
centred
in omega subjectivity, would hopefully one day supersede it.
In fact, it was probably
less correct to speak in evolutionary terms from alpha to omega, as
Timothy
generally preferred to do out of a literary need to simplify, than in
devolutionary terms from the Alpha to the world, and thence in
evolutionary
terms from another point in the world, necessarily contrary to the
first point,
towards the Omega that lay beyond it ... in the 'Kingdom of Heaven'
which, as
Christ Himself taught, lay within, and could therefore only be reached
through
self-realization of, presumably, a meditative order.
Such was the general
nature, give and take a few political diversions of the sort which were
guaranteed to infuriate those clerics who believed the Church should
stay out
of politics instead of coming down fairly and squarely on the side of
justice
and the people's freedom struggles in general, of Timothy's voice
recording,
and by the time the writer had finished reading from his notes,
O'Donnell was
scratching his head and wondering whether this was the sort of material
that
could in fact be used in his booths in future, and whether it wasn't
likely to
arouse more opposition from vested interests than even Huxley had done,
given
the radically transcendental and even gnostic
nature
of the bulk of its paradoxical subject-matter which, despite certain
contradictions and inconsistencies, pointed man towards a completely
new order
of religious moralizing which left no room for concepts like the
Creator
whatsoever. Nevertheless, he was
impressed by Timothy's intellectual and spiritual depth, and warmly
congratulated him on his contribution to the
For his part, Timothy
simply smiled and bowed his head. This
world, he knew, was not cut-out for people like himself, but only for
liberals,
or amoral people who kept in touch, no matter how intermittently, with
the
Alpha, and he was under no illusions as to the difficulty of the
struggle to
defeat strength in order that truth, and truth alone, could come fully
into its
own and receive the recognition it ultimately deserved, and he, the
self-styled
thinker of thinkers, the idealistic philosopher king, along with it. But until he sat on the world's throne, so to
speak, in the name of heavenly salvation, his amoral enemies would
continue to
sit on it and for very different, if not diametrically opposite,
reasons. That much was certain!
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
It
was
about 7.30 the following Wednesday evening when Timothy
Byrne arrived at Lord Handon's
The room in which
Timothy now found himself was decorated in a restrained neo-classical
manner,
with delicate touches of floriate stucco
on the
walls, which, in contrast to the white ceiling, were of a pale-green
matt
tone. It wasn't long, however, before he
abandoned his initial interest in this craftsmanship and plunged into
reflections on the spiritual superiority, as he saw it, of photographic
reproductions over actual materialistic productions.
He had no desire to get carried away by the
all-too-palpable productions in front of him!
Meanwhile, Lord Handon had emerged from the library at the rear
of the
house to welcome his guest with outstretched hand.
"Come into the library," he
insisted, "since it's warmer there at present and, being an author
yourself, you'll probably prefer it."
Timothy obligingly
followed the viscount back along the passageway and into a small
brightly-lit
room, where he was offered a seat in one of its two dark-blue velvet
armchairs. Bookshelves lined the walls
on opposite sides of it, whilst an expensive-looking electric fire,
complete
with imitation coals, burned away in an unostentatious chimney-piece
set deeply
into a wall exclusively dedicated to modern paintings, and a fourth
wall, which
also contained some modern paintings, was graced by a pair of french windows through which part of the
elongated back
garden could be glimpsed. A mahogany
table and a walnut writing-desk were the chief items of furniture in
the room -
the table standing in the middle, the desk against the chimney-piece
wall at a
discreet remove from the fire (as of course were the paintings). A dark-blue settee and the armchairs were its
other large possessions.
"Here's a drop of
liqueur to warm you up, assuming you don't
object," said Lord Handon, handing Timothy
a
small glass of brandy. "I wait on
people myself more often than not on quiet evenings like this,
especially where
drink is concerned." He sat down opposite
his guest to the other side of the fire and gazed across at him in
silence
awhile, before adding: "We'll be having dinner shortly, when Geraldine
has
finished with the bathroom and is ready to join us.
She has been out most of the day with a
friend."
"Oh,
really?" Timothy responded, momentarily looking-up from his
brandy. He had quite forgotten about
her. "Not
"No, a girlfriend
actually," Lord Handon corrected. "One of her
fellow-undergraduates."
After a brief pause, he continued: "As for
"Do I!"
replied Timothy impulsively.
"They're two of the finest paintings I've ever seen. Really, I had absolutely no idea Gowling was such a gifted and sensitive artist!"
"No, he doesn't
talk all that much about his work actually," Lord Handon
remarked. "But I only bought them
because I couldn't get hold of any Mondrians
at the
time and wanted something approximately similar. Then
I
saw these two works advertised in a
catalogue, one day, and snapped them up as quickly as possible. If one can't get hold of the real thing, one
has to make do with copies, I suppose."
Timothy's feelings
plummeted drastically, and not only because of the viscount's obviously
predatory instinct to snap things up!
"But these aren't copies," he objected.
"I must say, they
look rather derivative to me," Lord Handon
averred. "Although
the balance of the parts is, on the whole, less good than in Mondrian, probably on account of Gowling's
homosexual tendencies."
It was obvious to
Timothy that Lord Handon didn't really
appreciate the
value of what he possessed! There was a
Biblical maxim concerning pearls and swine which seemed not
inappropriate here
- the very same maxim which had briefly crossed his mind when
confronted by
Lady Handon's religious intransigence, not
so many
weeks ago.
"As for these
paintings here," the viscount continued, drawing his guest's attention
to
a pair of slightly larger abstracts which reposed on the wall to the
right of
where he was sitting, "they're by the Swiss artist, Max Bill, and are
in
his most geometrically cubist style, if one can so term it. A series of
different-coloured rectangles and squares in regular juxtaposition. Quite absorbing, don't you think?"
"Indeed!"
Timothy admitted, though he couldn't see them properly from where he
sat
because of the dazzling reflection of the electric light on their shiny
surfaces. Nevertheless there were a
number of other paintings, including a Victor Pasmore
to the left of the Gowlings, which he
could see quite
plainly, and these also briefly captured his attention.
He hadn't bargained for even one
abstract
painting in the library.
"I also have a
number of other modern works scattered about the house," Lord Handon offhandedly revealed.
"Which is one of the
reasons why my wife absolutely refuses to live here. As you may have noticed, during your visit to
my country residence, there are no twentieth-century works hanging
there. It's very much as it was when I
inherited it
from my father."
"Yes, I'd been
especially puzzled by the apparent absence of modern literature from
the
library actually," Timothy confessed, slightly changing the subject.
"Ah well, that's
because it's mostly here," rejoined Lord Handon,
who
waved
an arm in the general direction of the bookshelves lining the
wall
behind him. "I couldn't very well
fit these smaller, modern works into so traditional a library as the
one at Rothermore House, even had I wanted
to. Instead, I prefer to maintain two
distinctly
separate collections - the bigger and more traditional one at Rothermore, the smaller and more contemporary
one here in
what is, culturally speaking, a house of my
own
making. At any rate, I allow myself a
degree of modernity here that I would never countenance in the country. I'm torn, if you like, between two worlds -
unable to exclusively reconcile myself to either one of them."
"I much prefer this
one," Timothy affirmed, staring across at the tightly-packed shelves of
modern literature.
"Yes, I thought you
would," said Lord Handon, smiling.
"Unfortunately, not being of your class, I'm less than comfortable with
just the modern."
Timothy blushed slightly
on reception of this startling confession.
He wouldn't have expected the adverb in Handon's
second sentence.
"I've inherited a
ton weight of tradition, you see," the viscount continued, "and to a
certain extent I'm chained to it. My
constitution isn't such that I can break away from it merely at the
suggestion
of doing so. My country residence does,
after all, mean a great deal to me.... Of course, I'm quite aware that,
despite
what you said in the Voice Museum last week, you didn't really like it
and
would under no circumstances wish to live in such a large property
yourself. I wasn't blind to certain of
your facial responses in several of the rooms there, least of all the
library,
where you virtually went pale with revulsion ..."
"Oh, but
really...!" Timothy protested.
"Aha! You needn't
feel obliged to pretend otherwise tonight!" Lord Handon
countered. "I could tell from the
moment you set foot in the driveway leading up to the house that you
weren't
particularly looking forward to your visit.
I was watching you discreetly from one of the drawing-room
windows, you
know. Saw you shake your head a couple
of times before mustering sufficient courage to approach."
Timothy's blush had
perceptibly deepened with these remarks - so much so, that he sought
temporary
distraction in another sip of brandy.
"And I continued to
keep a discreet eye on you throughout the evening," Lord Handon went on, "particularly during that hour
following your religious lecture, as it were, when I took you and a
couple of
the others on a guided tour of the rooms.
There were moments, when you thought I had my attention
elsewhere,
during which your distaste for certain of my antique possessions was
clearly
manifest, believe me!"
There was no alternative,
seemingly, but for Timothy to confess the truth. "Very
well,
I'll admit that certain of
your possessions and, indeed, your house in general was obnoxious to
me,"
he sighed. "As you know, I'm
chiefly interested in spirituality, not in the worship, conscious or
otherwise,
of materialism, no matter how cultivated or elaborate it may happen to
be. All that is
somehow
distasteful to me."
"So I
realize," Lord Handon responded, lighting
himself a mild cigar of the type Timothy had seen him smoking in the
"No, I suppose
not," Timothy conceded, smiling faintly over his brandy.
"Although it's not just the size of your
country house that I object to, nor, for that matter, the amount of
cumbersome
furniture or number of antiquated paintings there."
"Presumably you
don't like the fact that it stands in close proximity to nature and is
thus
surrounded by the sensual offspring of both the sun and the earth's
core?"
Lord Handon conjectured.
"No, I don't much
like that either," Timothy admitted, growing bolder.
"For as you'll
doubtless be aware, nature is a predominantly subconscious phenomenon. However, I have to say, by way of attempting
to mollify you slightly, that I quite admired the way it had been
considerably
tamed and shaped into aesthetically-pleasing motifs in the immediate
vicinity
of your house. The well-trimmed texture
of the lawn was also commendable, as was the total absence of
overgrowth on the
exterior walls of the house."
Lord Handon
smiled his pleasure at this unexpected commendation.
"You mean you were relieved that nature
hadn't been allowed to directly impinge upon them?"
"Absolutely!"
Timothy confirmed. "It's one of the
saddest and most distasteful sights I know, these days, to see the
walls of a
beautiful old house overgrown with creepers, as though under siege from
the
Diabolic Alpha. One feels that, at any
moment, nature may completely overrun the place, erasing all traces of
civilization. But, fortunately, that
wasn't the kind of feeling I got while standing in the vicinity of your
house. No, if I must confess to my other
main objections, it was to what might be termed the pagan, or
pseudo-pagan,
content of the house - the fact, namely, of its having been built with
so
marked a classical influence and containing so many objects -
statues, objects
d'art, and the like - of pagan association."
"No doubt, you're
alluding to the nude or semi-nude gods and goddesses in rooms like the
library," Lord Handon declared, with a
gentle
though evidently self-critical frown.
"I had noted your aloofness with regard to my Venus statuette in
imitation of Phidias, not to mention your
disdain for
the first-century Greek vase in the billiards room, where there was
also a
certain amount of classical statuary."
"Indeed!"
Timothy concurred, becoming freshly embarrassed by the accuracy of Lord
Handon's memory.
"Well, yes, I was
alluding
to
them,
as also to the abundance of pilasters and columns with which the
house is
supplied. Unfortunately, the spectacle
of so many pagan trappings has a distinctly depressing effect on me
these days,
whether the buildings in question be
secular or
religious, private or public. I'm rather
more in favour of buildings which transcend pagan associations
altogether, as
do virtually all truly modern ones.
Indeed, those of us of a progressive disposition are relatively
fortunate to be living in an age which has completely turned its back
on the
pagan architecture of classical antiquity, in favour of a uniquely
modern
style. Not since the great age of Gothic
cathedrals has
Lord Handon
nodded his antique head in apparent agreement and, smiling weakly
through the
dense haze of cigar smoke he had just exhaled, said: "I take it you're
in
favour of the Gothic, then?"
"To the extent that
it represented Christian progress rather than pagan or classical
nostalgia -
yes, at least in its historical context," Timothy responded. "For I'm much more in favour of that
which represents transcendental progress and thereby testifies to a
still
higher development - like, for example, the great works of Walter Gropius and Mies
Van der Rohe."
"You'd get on well
with Nigel Townley, were you to talk to
him about
this," Lord Handon averred, referring to
the
architect Timothy had first met on New Year's Eve.
"His architecture happens to be very
transcendental or, at any rate, contemporary too - mostly window space
with
slender infills of a synthetic order. One of the most
uncompromisingly modern architects currently at work in this country." He puffed a moment on his cigar, looking
towards the bookshelves that lined the wall behind his guest, then continued: "But I take your point as regards
the
abundance of classical decoration in my other house, which, personally,
I'm not
that terribly keen on myself. Of course,
one shouldn't assume that all
architecture
since the Gothic age and up to the modern one is necessarily decadent
or
reactionary, for it certainly isn't! No
ancient Greek or Roman could have conceived of the majority of country
houses
still in existence, least of all those which have no truck with the
classical
at all, such as the early Manor Houses and Tudor dwellings. But there are, however, a large number of
buildings that can be described as decadent or
reactionary and,
to some extent, I share your distaste for
them. My own Baroque mansion isn't exactly
reactionary, but it does contain a sufficiency of classical detail to
render it
- how shall I say? - unacceptable or even
obnoxious to
anyone with a transcendental bias, I'll concede. Which,
to
a certain extent, also applies to
this town house, with its restrained neo-classicism, à
la Nash. I can tolerate it, but you
would doubtless prefer your little Neo-Plasticist
flat, or whatever it is.
"However, don't
think I begrudge you your objections to my property," Lord Handon went on, following a short pause. "In light of your spiritual views, they
make perfect sense to me. And I'm rather
taken by the idea that, in any ultimate sense, God is the outcome of
the
Universe instead of its initiator, and consequently that human progress
has to
do with gradually overcoming nature, both internal and external, so
that
sensual, materialistic matters come, by degrees, to play a less
pervasive role
in society. I think you're probably
right, though I can't go as far as you in opposing it.
You despise me, I know, since you see the
extent to which materialism has a hold on me and calculate my position
in
relation to this envisaged spiritual outcome of evolution to be rather
a low
one. Very well, you're entitled to judge
according to your transvaluated lights!"
Here Timothy made a
half-hearted attempt at protesting in Lord Handon's
favour, but the latter would have none of it.
"No, I know how you
feel and wouldn't wish you to pretend otherwise," he rejoined,
undaunted. "You're the only one of
the seven New Year's Eve guests who took a dim view of me, and that I
can now
understand. I couldn't quite understand
it at first however, in fact not until a few days after you'd gone and
a number
of your religious views began to rise to the surface of my mind, like
bubbles
of enlightenment. Then I started to see
the world as though through your eyes.
Perhaps I underwent a sort of religious conversion, or rebirth? For I immediately abandoned my wife to her
pagan predilections and came up here, where I proceeded to read Huysmans' À
Rebours. I
hadn't read that great Manichean novel in
years, but the artificial pursuits of its principal character struck me
as
having a profound bearing on what you'd said concerning the necessity
of our
gradually overcoming nature, which is fundamentally evil, in order to
attain to
God; overcoming the subconscious darkness in order to attain to the superconscious light.
Des Esseintes was somewhat
over-ambitious in
his anti-natural endeavours and succumbed, in the end, to nervous
crises which
precipitated his enforced return to Paris and, so one is led to
believe, a
less-radical lifestyle. You remember the
story?"
"More or
less," Timothy admitted, nodding vaguely.
"Well, formerly,
when I first read the book, many years ago, it seemed to represent an
implicit
condemnation of Des Esseintes' artificial
aspirations, being a lesson in what would almost inevitably happen to
anyone
who was too much against nature. But
now, since re-reading it, I've come to doubt that assumption and to
believe
instead that, although its protagonist ultimately failed in his
spiritual
endeavours, the attempt was inherently praiseworthy, signifying a
general
evolutionary trend towards greater artificiality, which would seem to
be increasingly
pervasive in modern society. Rather than
being reactionary, the novel struck me as somehow prophetic."
"From what I can
recall of À
Rebours, I would say that it was
both reactionary and prophetic," Timothy commented. "Reactionary so far as certain aspects
of the protagonist's Catholicism were concerned; prophetic in relation
to his
anti-natural or, rather, artificial aspirations. However,
I'll
admit to a tendency I sometimes
have, these days, of asking people whether they're Lady Chatterley
types
or À Rebours types.
If the former, then I automatically take a
dim view of them, since they're more likely to be heathen bastards who
either
lack the courage or intelligence to go against nature.
If the latter, then I'm inclined to adopt a
respectful attitude towards them, since they seem to be on the side of
moral
progress and to whatever pertains, in Christ-like transvaluation,
to
a
supernatural rebirth, a rebirth which takes its cue from the spirit
rather
than nature, and is totally against anything cosmic.
There are some, of course, who don't know how
to answer, never having read either book.
But most people whom I come into contact with tend to fall into
one or
other of these two categories, and are thus autocratic or theocratic
rather
than simply democratically liberal."
Lord Handon
saw fit to guffaw through the defensive haze of his cigar smoke. "I take it you dislike D.H. Lawrence,
then?" he surmised.
"When he's a
nature-mongering heathen and paganized
advocate of
salvation through sex, like Wilhelm Reich - yes, I most certainly do!"
Timothy averred. "For he has put
his salvation in the world rather than in God or the spirit, as the
case may
be, and the one necessarily excludes the other.
That seems to be truly 'against the grain' of evolutionary
progress. Indeed, his would be among the
first books I'd ban, if I had the power."
The viscount guffawed
anew, this time less boisterously.
"There would be a lot of people in this country who would oppose
any intended proscription of D.H. Lawrence!" he opined, a mischievous
glint of light in his eyes.
"I for one!"
asseverated the voice of a young woman.
It was Geraldine Handon, who,
having taken a
bath, was now dressed for dinner in a pale-green satin dress with
complementary
dark-green stockings. Her hair was
pinned-up behind her head, rendering both her neck and a pair of
emerald
earrings clearly visible on either side.
She wafted a refreshing scent of sweet perfume into the library.
"I was only
alluding to one or two of his books," Timothy confessed, blushing at
the
sudden sight of a female who, though attractive in herself, was dressed
in too
autocratic a manner for his tastes.
"He was joking
really," Lord Handon declared.
"So I would
hope!" Geraldine smilingly remarked.
Then, offering the writer her hand, she added: "Delighted to see
you again, Mr Byrne."
CHAPTER
TWELVE
He
was
late arriving home from Lord Handon's
and, feeling tired, went straight to bed, where he quickly fell into a
deep
sleep. During the course of it he
dreamed that he was alone with Geraldine in her father's library. She was dressed more or less as she had been
earlier, with her dark-brown hair pinned-up as before and a décolleté
dress of indeterminate colour exposing a good deal of her firm, shapely
breasts. She had extracted a copy of Lady
Chatterley's
Lover from one of the bookshelves and was languidly turning
over the pages with a strange, gently-alluring smile on her lips. Timothy stood beside her, looking-on and
wondering what was in her mind, when, moving closer to him, she
suddenly said:
"I like this book. Do you?"
He was on the point of
saying 'yes' ... when he checked himself and, turning away from her,
replied
firmly in the negative.
"But why ever
not?" she gasped.
"Because ..."
But the words wouldn't come, despite the attempt he was making to force
them,
and he grew angry. Automatically he turned around to snatch the book
from
Geraldine's hands but discovered, to his utter surprise, that she had
already
returned it to the shelf and was now standing in front of him in the
nude.
"Perhaps you prefer
the real thing?" she suggested, smiling seductively, and, before he
could
say anything or even move away from her, she threw her arms around his
neck and
drew herself closer to him.
He struggled to free
himself from her embrace. "Not with
you!" he cried.
"But why-on-earth
not?" she protested, becoming more determined to cling to him.
"Because you're an
aristocrat's daughter, and I don't wish to associate with you!" he
shouted.
Yet, already, her
determination was beginning to weaken his resistance, both physically
and
psychologically; for she had now wrapped her legs about his waist and
was
drawing him down to the carpet while showering his face with kisses. "Don't be silly!" she admonished
him, as they tumbled to the floor.
"You know I'm better-looking than Sarah."
"You're
too
young for me," he objected. "Besides
..." But his penis was beginning to
respond
positively, in spite of the effort he was still making to free himself
from
her, and, as his mouth encountered one of her breasts, more by accident
than
design, he felt it slide into her and he involuntarily began to succumb
to the
motions of coitus.
"Ah yes, I knew
you'd prefer me," Geraldine was saying, as she clung to him even more
tightly. "We have so much in
common."
"No!" he
protested. "That's where you're
dead wrong!"
But she simply smiled
back at him from her ecstasy of sexual stimulation, while he hesitated
on the
brink of orgasm.
"No!" he
protested again. "You shan't
fucking-well have it!"
But he was too late. For his orgasm
had attained to its implacable
climax and now spurted into her almost before he knew what was
happening. He awoke with a sudden start! His blood vessels beat fiercely in his
temples, his mouth hung open in fright, his
eyes
stared wildly into the darkness. It was
over! Underneath him a sticky mess of
sperm stuck uncomfortably to his lower abdomen and hung in expanding
globules from
his pubic hair, soiling the sheet. He
had simply experienced a wet dream! In
reality, Geraldine was still in
The following evening he
telephoned Sarah, to discuss his visit to Lord Handon's
with her. She was interested to hear
what he had to say about the conversation which had taken place in the
library,
but not too keen, for reasons best known to herself, to reveal much
about her
own experiences there the previous week.
In fact, she was slightly taken-aback that Timothy seemed to
know
something about it, and, learning that Geraldine had raised the subject
over
dinner, asked him what he thought of her.
"What is one
supposed to think?" he responded, clearly puzzled.
"Well, did she give
you the impression that she was jealous of our relationship and more
interested
in seducing you than in simply being present at dinner?" Sarah bluntly
asked.
"Oh,
quite definitely!" Timothy admitted, blushing in spite of his
physical solitude at his end of the line.
"I even got the impression that I was being primed by Lord Handon for just such a seduction.
After all, why else would he invite me over
to dinner with no-one except his daughter there? And
she
had certainly gone to some pains to
make herself as attractive as possible, I can tell you!
Had even taken a bath prior
to dinner."
Sarah giggled briefly at
her end of the line. "And did you
fall for it?" she wanted to know.
"I could hardly do
that!" Timothy gasped. "She is
only nineteen and, besides, I don't particularly like her, as I think
you
know. But I had a bad dream last night
during which I more or less did
fall for
her, and in more than a metaphorical sense."
"I think you'd
better keep the sordid details of that to yourself," Sarah advised him.
"I had no
intentions of revealing them to you," Timothy retorted.
"Anyway, considering that she is going
back to
"You have no idea
how the perverse minds of such young women function," Sarah rejoined. "Besides, she would have expected you to
follow her there."
"What, pack my bags
and abandon my little flat in order to live in that stuffy old town?"
Timothy objected. "You're
kidding!"
Sarah giggled anew, this
time less briefly, before saying: "You apparently have little notion of
the lady's self-importance or of the extent to which her noble birth
has
convinced her that she can get what she wants simply by wanting it. By all accounts, you ought to be prepared to
live in
"Humph!"
exclaimed Timothy, becoming indignant.
"Well, if by any chance I ever did decide to make a mistress of
her, she'd be living on my terms, not I on hers."
"I can well
imagine," said Sarah. "Yet Joe
Handon was evidently keen to test your
integrity by
placing this temptation before you, to see whether you'd bend. He probably conjectured that your moral
theory would be well in advance of your mundane practice, so that you'd
be
susceptible to Geraldine's charms. And
then, when you fell for her, the pair of them could start undermining
your
theory, reducing your spiritual standing still further.
Besides, just supposing you did follow
Geraldine to
"Stop it,
Sarah!" protested an irate Timothy Byrne.
"I don't want to hear any more of this crap!
She'll never get me as far as
"Nothing that
should give you any cause for alarm," Sarah replied, smiling to
herself. "I haven't seen all that
much of him anyway - no more than you actually.
On Friday, when we dined together, he simply talked and ...
well, patted
and caressed me a little, that's all."
"Like he did on the
wooden bridge in his grounds at Rothermore
House the
week before?" Timothy blurted out, unable to restrain the impulse to
reveal his secret.
Sarah blushed violently
and almost dropped the receiver from her hand.
It shocked her that Timothy had seen that, especially since he
couldn't
have been the only one! At length,
steadying her nerves, she plied him for more information.
It was rather embarrassing, even on the
phone. He hadn't been unaffected by the
scene, he let her know, but had felt quite humiliated with Geraldine
standing
beside him, slyly taking pleasure in his discomfort.
"Well, I'm sorry
you should have felt that way," she duly remarked, her voice fraught
with
tension. "And
sorry, too, that you should have seen us. But,
really,
what else could I do, under the
circumstances? I had to let him have his
way because he was so persuasive and, besides, as his guest, I wasn't
exactly
in a position to be negative. Neither
was Sheila Johnston who, in any case, seemed to enjoy his physical
attentions
more than myself, and thus made it seem all the more acceptable. I just didn't have the nerve to object, not
with Irene and Girish standing nearby as
well. Although I did check him when he
took his
liberties a little too far and tried to reach under my briefs, the
dirty
bugger!"
"So I recall,"
said Timothy with a faint smile.
"But he presumably took his liberties a little further in the
privacy of his town house the other night, did he?"
"I'd rather not
answer that, if you don't mind," Sarah responded. "What
I
think you ought to know,
however, is that the old bugger is impotent, and consequently unable to
do
anything more than kiss and caress women."
"Oh
really?" It came as quite a
pleasant surprise to Timothy, who elected to conjecture: "You mean, he's reduced to a kind of
Sarah knew precious
little about Havelock Ellis, but found the suggestion slightly amusing,
in
spite of her seriousness.
"Unfortunately for him, that is precisely the case, Tim, and the
main reason why he no longer gets on so well with his wife. Consequently you have nothing to fear from
his relationship with me, which, in any event, is of little account. Friday was my first and, so far as I'm
concerned, last visit to his other house. His sexuality bores me."
"And bores his
daughter too, I shouldn't wonder!" Timothy averred, allowing himself
the
luxurious benefit of a little incestuous speculation.
"She was present with him on Friday,
presumably?"
"No, as a matter of
fact she was out during the greater part of the evening and only
returned home
towards eleven o'clock, after I'd declined an invitation to stay the
night and
was on the point of leaving," Sarah revealed. "Had
she
not turned-up when she did, Joe
Handon might have persuaded me to change my
mind, so
I'm rather glad of the fact. You can't
imagine how uncomfortable it would be, having to pass the night in his
bony
company!"
"Maybe
he thought you'd be able to cure him of his
impotence?" Timothy suggested.
"I
don't think even the combined efforts of Cleopatra and
Helen of
"Well," he
said after a brief pause, during which time only some faint crackling
on the
line could be heard, "now I begin to understand why Handon
behaved towards you as he did, on the bridge at Rothermore
House. It may even explain why he has
certain spiritually progressive tendencies one would ordinarily
hesitate to
associate with such a man. Hmm, very
interesting! Perhaps he imagined that I,
too, was impotent, to be so spiritual, and hoped to have someone of his
own sex
in whom to confide?"
"He was making a
big mistake if he did imagine that!" Sarah declared.
"And it wouldn't exactly explain his
endeavour to get you off with his daughter - assuming that was really
his
intention. Not unless, however, it led
to his finding out, through her, whether you were impotent, too. For she could probably be depended upon to
tell him one way or another, once she learnt the score, couldn't she?"
"I
expect so," conceded Timothy, who was quite
impressed by Sarah's speculative capacity at this moment.
"Although he could
have found that out more easily by asking you, surely? After all, you know more about my sexual
status than anyone else right now."
"You needn't remind
me," the opera singer retorted, blushing profusely in her Hampstead
living-room. "But he isn't aware of
what I know, and neither, for that matter, is his daughter. He wasn't in the least aware that we slept
together at Rothermore House, and what has
happened since
then is completely unknown to him. Had
he realized that you became my lover recently, I rather doubt he'd have
invited
me over to
"Well, I'm blowed!" cried Timothy, raising his brows in
surprised
relief. "And he never once asked
you about me?"
"Never," Sarah
confirmed. "He evidently didn't think
I'd have anything to tell him.
Naturally, he did mention you, telling me what a rampant
freethinker you
were and of how puzzled and strangely impressed he had been by some of
your
ideas, not all of which he considered crazy or contradictory. But that was as far as it went.
Fundamentally, he was more interested in
finding out what he could about me and my work.
Even the fact of our simultaneous presence at the
"That does surprise
me, I must say," declared Timothy.
"After all, we were the only two recording participants there at
the time."
"Yes, but he
probably didn't realize we came together, and as he prevented us from
leaving
together by taking me for a drink, while you were in the recording
studio, he
had little cause to dwell on the possibility.
It appears, anyway, that Nigel Townley
turned
up just after you'd left. For Joe Handon mentioned him to me on Friday. They apparently met outside the recording
studio, following Handon's return from the
pub at
approximately a quarter-to-five. You
must have just missed him."
"Yes, it was about
four-thirty when I took my leave of the damn place," Timothy admitted
frowningly. "And
how relieved I was to get out of it, what with all those noisy kids and
stupid
tourists!"
"As you told me on
Sunday," Sarah reminded him.
"Anyway, we won't have to visit it again for some time -
assuming
we ever do, that is! I, for one, am not
convinced that my incipient fame will endure for much longer anyway."
Timothy was slightly
puzzled by this. "How d'you
mean?" he asked.
"Well ..." and
she hesitated a moment, as though afraid to continue "... there's
always
the possibility that someone to my liking will oblige me to become a
mother before
long."
"Ah, so that's
it!" cried Timothy, who sent a sharp burst of nasal smile down the
line. Yes, there was always that
possibility
where such an attractive young woman as Sarah Field was concerned, and
he knew
full-well, at this moment, about his own position in relation to her
and the
fact that he might well pose such a threat to her professional status
himself
in the future. He might, though as yet
there was no absolute guarantee of it, since he wasn't deeply in love
with her
and had no immediate desire to become a father.
Then, too, the Werther
recording she
had lent him confirmed him in his high regard for her singing, and made
him
feel uncomfortable at the prospect of subsequently imposing motherhood
upon her
and thereby depriving the opera-loving public of her voice. It was as though her operatic talents were
too great to be sacrificed to marriage and its numerous domestic and
maternal
responsibilities, even for a relatively short period of time.
And
yet, if she meant what she had said, that first time she
visited his flat, about being a woman first and foremost and a singer
secondly,
then a mother she would eventually have to be, regardless of whatever
loss to
the public her absence from opera, temporary or otherwise, might entail. And a mother, in all probability, of more
than one child, since Timothy had himself been an only child and,
assuming he
married Sarah, had no wish to inflict a similar fate on anyone else,
considering the amount of loneliness and solitude involved.
But
would he marry her?
Ah, that was the rub, and he had yet to come to anything like a
final
decision on the matter. True, he wasn't
deeply in love with her, but was it absolutely necessary to be deeply
in love,
these days, before deciding to get married and have children? Indeed, was it possible to be deeply in love
with anyone at all, given the environmental and technological
circumstances
under which most people lived, and the fact that, certainly in his
case, one
was no longer an emotional young adolescent in the first spring of life? If deep love was the necessary criterion for
marriage, then perhaps Timothy would never marry, neither Sarah nor
anyone
else.
Naturally,
he
had known true love as an adolescent, and as an
adolescent, moreover, accustomed to suburban and provincial
environments. There was something about
relatively close
proximity to nature that fired the blood, granting emotional depth to
one's
love. But what of the adult confined for
years in a big city, where nature is comparatively scarce and the
artificial
predominates? Can one expect the same
degree of love from him and, if not, why should he
waste time waiting for it, like a provincial adolescent?
Surely, therefore, the absence of deep love
should not be seen as a reason for scorning marriage and its parental
concomitants? Surely one should rather
equate this absence with the comparatively non-sensuous influence of
the urban
environment and consequently resign oneself to the possibility of
getting
married and having children without
being
deeply in love? And if the marriage
subsequently broke up, as so many modern marriages did, and the mother
was
obliged to seek welfare, might not the absence of deep, lasting love -
to some
extent due to the urban environment and its artificial pressures - be
the chief
explanation of this phenomenon, and might it not be indicative,
moreover, of an
evolutionary trend, in spite of all the short-term hardships? It was an interesting thought, and Timothy
Byrne had more than once weighed the possibility in recent weeks,
seeking in it
an explanation of his relative coolness towards Sarah, who was, after
all, an
extremely attractive and highly intelligent person.
Of course, there was also the fact that they
hadn't known each other for very long, though this hardly seemed to
explain
everything, least of all his physical intimacy with her.
Be that as it may, he
had even tried to pin his coolness towards her on her less progressive
lifestyle. But this assumption didn't
particularly convince him of the whole truth either, especially since
he was
keen on French opera too, and shared similar tastes in instrumental
music. Admittedly, his tastes might be
more eclectic
than hers, embracing some modern jazz, though that wasn't to say she
couldn't
be brought around to the virtues of musical eclecticism herself in due
course. On the contrary, there was every
chance that she would come to appreciate the subtleties and ingenuities
of the
best electric music, if given the right encouragement.
As yet, she hadn't expressed any overt
disapproval of it - at any rate, not of such electric music as he
collected. Her temperament was, after
all, fairly well-attuned to his and, since women were generally a
complaisant
and ductile sex, liberated exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, he
had scant
grounds for imagining that she would inevitably remain aloof from his
higher
tastes, even if she couldn't quite relate to them with the same fervour
as
himself ... largely on account of her professional commitments to opera.
No, in all likelihood,
his relative coolness towards her chiefly stemmed from the artificial
influence
of the urban environment in which he had lived or, rather, existed, as
though
in exile from sensuous life, for the past decade. He
would
never fall deeply in love with her,
or, for that matter, with anyone else.
Yet if she was in love with him, as he had been led to believe
the
previous week, might it not be largely attributable to the fact that
she was a
woman, and thus inherently more emotional?
A woman, moreover, who lived in a comparatively less-urbanized
part of
north London, in closer proximity to nature's sensuous influence, as
embodied
by Hampstead Heath, Kenwood, Parliament Hill Fields, and surrounding
areas of
grassland or garden?
Yes, there was no reason
for one to exclude that
possibility, since different types
of environment were bound, sooner or later, to engender different
influences. To pretend otherwise was
unrealistic. One would simply be turning
one's back on the facts.
And if these facts were leading one to the
conclusion that being unable to fall deeply in love with another person
wasn't
necessarily a disgrace or a misfortune, well then, one simply had to
accept it,
irrespective of what conventional criteria might suggest.
And if this meant that the family, conceived
as an atomic entity, was on the way out in this increasingly
post-atomic age -
well then, so be it! Let evolution take
its inexorable course towards a better future, a future in which
spiritual
rather than sensual love came to play a greater role, and men broke
free of
cosmic determinism. Let us continue to
turn away from the sun's fiery influence and aspire ever more keenly
towards
establishing the Holy Spirit, the eternity of spiritual bliss in which
not us ... so much as the transcendent
spirit of human beings
will reign supreme in the Universe. Let
us look forwards to the Divine Omega, not backwards to the Diabolic
Alpha. And if this meant that Timothy
should marry
Sarah without being deeply in love with her, well then, marry her he
damn-well
would - provided she let him.
"Yes," he at
length said, following his bout of amused surprise, "you might well
find
yourself with a husband before long."
"Any idea
who?" she playfully asked, over a slight giggle.
"Well, if you're prepared
to accept me, you'd have the answer to that question right here and
now,"
he calmly informed her, somewhat to his own surprise.
There was a puzzled
silence at Sarah's end of the line, as she endeavoured to assimilate
the
implications of his response. Then,
somewhat tentatively, she asked him: "Are you actually proposing to me
over the phone?"
"Yes, I guess
so," he admitted. "In point of
fact, I can think of no better way of doing so."
Another puzzled silence
on Sarah's part, before she could bring herself to say: "And have you
seriously considered the matter?"
"Quite
a few times."
"And you love
me?"
"As
much as I shall ever do."
Yet another silence from
Sarah - this time more stunned than puzzled - which was broken by:
"Well,
if that's the case, I can only say - yes!"
"Good, that settles
it then," he concluded, his heart by now beating twice as fast as
normally. "We'll get married in a
registry office as soon as possible. And
this time I mean it, honestly."
"I believe
you," responded Sarah, who was almost in tears. In
fact,
her right hand was beginning to
shake, so that she could barely hold the telephone receiver up to her
ear.
"Well,
until we meet again, I had better say goodbye,"
said Timothy, who had no desire to prolong the conversation, now that
he had
seemingly committed himself to a thing he would ordinarily have
considered
himself incapable of doing. "We can
talk about this some more tomorrow," he added, as though for his own
benefit. At which point he gently replaced
the receiver and, slumping back into his armchair, emitted a heartfelt
sigh of
relief. It hadn't occurred to him before
that he might one day find himself proposing marriage over the phone. But now that it had actually happened, he
felt that, as far as he was concerned, nothing could have been more
inevitable! A more naturalistic proposal
would simply have detracted, in his eyes, from his transcendental
integrity. He was sincerely grateful
that Sarah hadn't turned him down. She
had evidently learnt a lesson from him the previous week.
Either that or the
