Authors: Adam Nevill
TWENTY-ONE
‘Welcome, friend. Welcome.’ The woman’s body filled the doorway. Her garishly painted face was one big smile. Apryl tried to stop her astonishment freezing on her face. She’d barely recovered her bearings after the journey up to the twenty-eighth floor in a vandalized elevator that stank of urine and worse, before walking through a dim warren of yellowing cement corridors to find the front door of the flat Harold had included in his precise instructions.
‘I’m Harriet, the host of our little gatherings, and the secretary of our illustrious society.’ Harriet threw her great head back and shrieked, as if what she said was so funny a full laugh never had the time to slip out naturally and became a half-scream instead. ‘But you can call me
Figure of a Woman in Crisis.
Many of the gentlemen do.’ Again the shrieked laugh.
Now Apryl was doing her utmost not to stare at the woman’s curious shape and ghastly apparel. A red velvet gown that swept about the floor had been draped over elephantine limbs and a thick torso. Great breasts festooned with strings of wooden beads stretched out the chest area. Thick but sloppily applied cosmetics lathered her doughy face, from which small watery eyes beamed with an intensity Apryl couldn’t look into, so the path of her stare directed itself to the woman’s large head. A turban of green and turquoise scarves was wrapped about Harriet’s skull and loosely fixed at the front by a silver brooch. Like oily cobwebs, long strands of white-grey hair slipped out from beneath the headdress. Instantly, Apryl thought her mad.
‘And you are Apryl. Our second special guest this evening.’ The woman’s podgy hands clamped on the outside of each of Apryl’s arms to pull her further into the hot perfumed air of the flat. As Harriet moved aside, a cluttered and crowded living room revealed itself.
Incense sticks fixed in wooden bases burned around the large front room. They were placed with gothic candlesticks on sloping piles of books and on cabinets filled with tarot decks, oils, Indian jewellery, crystals, small ornate chests and carved statuettes.
‘Come. Come. Wine?’ the woman said. ‘Harold Rackam-Atterton is here. Who I believe you have spoken to. We’re all so excited by your visit. So thrilled.’ Her tiny grey eyes widened with a fresh rush of excitement.
Apryl couldn’t stop herself looking down at where the woman’s jewelled hands held onto her arms. The fingernails were long, but uneven in length and yellow towards the tips. As if aware of their scrutiny, the hands disappeared.
‘Please. Wine would be lovely,’ Apryl said, nervously, and was steered between three men with long, thinning grey hair. Their clothes smelled of damp and old sweat.
Before a little table the huge woman slopped cheap Merlot into a wine glass. ‘I’ll just seize Harold and bring him hither.’ Somewhere inside that high enthusiastic voice Apryl sensed a tremble of hysteria.
A curious blend of discordant jazz music mixed with Gregorian chant and clanging industrial machinery was playing on a paint-spattered tape recorder, mounted on a wooden stool beside the entrance to the kitchen. About which two balding young men with intense faces whispered to each other. They both wore woollen trench coats and knee-length cavalry boots, like some new freakish subculture she was unaware of and doubted would catch on.
But for an apartment in a tower block the place was surprisingly big inside; it must have been designed for a family. Apryl even noticed a staircase leading up to another level. Between the worn and sagging furniture, dark bookcases, dried plants in amphoras and old photographs cluttering the walls, she spied some of the original decor. Very British; very seventies. In places a watery yellow paint appeared between the bric-a-brac and mismatching wooden picture frames. It was stained with rashes of black-spore fungus. She could smell its powdery wet rot amid the incense.
At least fifteen people had crammed into the living room and occupied most of the floor space. All of the guests appeared to have made some effort to dress, or half-dress, in vintage costume. Two of the men behind the sofa wore top hats, and Apryl glimpsed watch chains against their waistcoats. Others had adopted cravats for the evening. But despite their attempts at vintage styling, the gathering appeared universally dishevelled. Suit jackets were stained. Trouser legs too short. Waistlines heaved up too high. Dresses were creased beyond redemption. Everyone was overweight or unhealthily thin. And oh God, the teeth. Stained grey, or yellow from neglect, crooked, sloping or snaggled in their sunken or lipless mouths. British teeth. She wondered how they all managed to acquire such appalling mouths. She was not in the habit of dismissing people on account of their appearance, but she’d never seen such an extraordinarily ugly group of people assembled in one room.
Their dressing might have been sloppy and their grooming careless due to their eccentricity, because eccentric they certainly were, but she suspected another motive: they were displaying a wilful opposition to anything aesthetically pleasing. They had expanded or withered with no thought to the tastes of the world around them. It was as if they had made themselves deliberately grotesque. They could all be the living embodiment of a Felix Hessen drawing in ink and gouache.
Three of the five women present were seated together on a couch. They were middle-aged and all wearing veils over faces painted in an operatic style. Their thin bodies were draped in long, funereal dresses that suggested the First World War. Elbow-length lace gloves concealed their arms, but were fingerless from the first knuckle, revealing long nails, unpainted. The fourth woman was elderly and wore a floppy green hat with a sagging brim that concealed most of her small head. She sat like a little girl sunken into an armchair made for adults, and had struck an absurd aristocratic pose with her head. As soon as Apryl met the elderly creature’s eye a sharp, surreal peal of laughter erupted from its thin mouth. For no reason that Apryl could determine. The woman then raised her chin and resumed a grim, imperious expression in silence.
Harriet was back, pushing through rumpled jackets and straggly heads, and bullying aside a bundle of thin legs. Behind her bobbed a fat, elderly man who Apryl presumed was Harold. Thick glasses in brown plastic frames magnified his eyes to four times their normal size, set in a large head, pink and hairless save for a circle of wispy white hair that fell about the shoulders of his stained dinner jacket.
‘Ahhhh,’ Harold sighed, opening his small mouth to reveal sparsely furnished gums. But the breath that rolled from it made her feel faint and sick. It was silvery and rusted with bacteria. The few teeth that remained in his mouth were the colour of wet peanuts. ‘A bloodline that has brushed against the greatest mind in the canon of art history graces one of our gatherings. You are as rare as documents bearing his signature, my dear. But we must steer your fledgling scholarship on a more reliable path. I’d like to show you a small work of my own later. Fifteen years in the making. What I would call a critical appreciation of Hessen’s artistic vision in the style of a dream narrative, in order to suggest what the missing oils must have resembled.’
‘We’re publishing it through the society,’ Harriet said, with so much enthusiasm her whole body shook. ‘The cover illustration is by one of our own members. I can take an advance order tonight. We’re selling in royal hardback at ninety pounds. Signed.’
Apryl didn’t know what to say, but nodded and held a smile on her face until it ached. But she didn’t need to reply as Harold was keen to begin the introductions. Nor did she have to think of anything to say to the characters who shook her hand; as she was escorted about the room the members were only too pleased to do all of the talking. Elsewhere in their lives she sensed a lack of opportunity to converse.
‘Yes, the American lady,’ said an elderly man with a thin face and wild white hair brushed across his conical skull. ‘Harold mentioned you. Have you been to the British Library? It has some nice prints of the
Contortions.
Have you seen
Figure of a Woman Clutching her Face?
And
Childbirth: Figure of a Dead Woman?
They have good prints of those too.’
Apryl told him she hadn’t.
‘You simply must go to the Black Dog and the Guardsmen’s Rest for a drink,’ another man with a severe lisp said. ‘Hessen used to go there. With Bryant, the poet. Of course the names have changed, but the ceilings above the bars are still original.’ He blinked his eyes rapidly.
‘I can take you,’ said a portly man in a frock coat. He was drunk and stared at her legs.
‘Calm yourself, Roger. Calm yourself,’ Harold said, not without a hint of irritation, before guiding Apryl away to where the four ladies sat. Placing his plump fingertips on each of Apryl’s shoulders, he whispered conspiratorially in her ear, ‘You may find Alice a trifle strange at first. But, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that is rarely a bad thing. She is in her nineties. And is someone you really must meet. We treasure her at our gatherings. You see, she is the only one of us who ever met Hessen.’
Apryl started, shaken out of her awkwardness in an instant. ‘Met him?’
Harold smiled with satisfaction. His big watery eyes swam behind the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. ‘Knew him, to be precise, in the late thirties. While the great man was emerging from his
Scenes After Death
phase, as far as we can ascertain. But her memory . . . Well . . . Not what it was.’
Apryl remembered reading in Miles’s book about what difficult years the late thirties were for Hessen. He’d visited Germany in 1937, expecting to be embraced as a hero of the Third Reich, due to the admiration of fascist ideals that he had expressed in
Vortex.
But by that time Hitler had grown tired of the obscure mystics and cults that were part of the early inspiration for National Socialism. Not only did lower-level Nazi officials reject Hessen’s drawings and art theory, due to the growing abstraction and surrealism he dealt with, but they also refused his application to join the Waffen SS. So characteristic of a man accustomed to making more enemies than friends, Hessen had misjudged the value of his vision.
He returned home incandescent with rage and inconsolable at the thought of what he deemed a betrayal, only then to be imprisoned for his political affiliations shortly after Britain declared war, and kept behind bars until 1945.
‘And we also suspect she knew him after he came out of prison too, for a brief while.’ Harold grinned, and winked, so clearly aware of the importance of his final comment.
Hessen lacked any of the pedigree and connections of Mosley, or the achievements of Ezra Pound, to enjoy a relaxation of the infamy that surrounded him after the war. Miles Butler assumed this was the reason he’d hidden himself away in Knightsbridge. And even Mosley had distanced himself from Hessen by then, considering him ‘decadent and unsound of mind’. Only an occultist and explorer, Eliot Coldwell, had championed his art in the fifties because of its connection with an ‘unseen world’. And not until the late seventies was minor critical scrutiny turned again to his surviving work. Now it was only the Friends of Felix Hessen, their garish website, and their speculative limited-edition publications that kept his name alive. Apryl found it all miserable and depressing. Hessen’s legacy, his enthusiasts, his art. Had it not been for his connection to her great-aunt, she wouldn’t have given any of it a moment of her time, and she now wished she’d never come to this ridiculous gathering. What a place to end up on a Friday night in London.
Apryl perched herself on the arm of the chair into which Alice’s thin body had sunk. Harold stayed close. Three fingers still maintained contact with her shoulder as if ready to spirit her away in a hurry.
She offered a smile to the three veiled women. Chalky faces glared at her through black netting. They muttered a greeting, but waited eagerly to listen to her talk with Alice.
‘Hello, Alice, I’m Apryl,’ she said, leaning down towards the hunched figure to see beneath the brim of the green hat. ‘I hear you and Felix Hessen were friends?’
An old face embossed with rheumy yellow eyes rose to look at her. Then smiled. A clawed hand came to rest on her knee, below the hem of her skirt. ‘Yes, dear. A long time ago.’ The dry pads of her fingers moved in little circles on the fabric of her stocking.
‘I’m sure you get asked about him all the time. My great-aunt knew him too.’
The frail hand moved from her knee to wave about in the air. ‘I’ve told you before, it all changed after the accident. It was never the same again. Of course, once there were the puppets and everything else like that. He showed us at the, the, the . . .’
‘Mews studio. Chelsea,’ Harold prompted.
‘Where are you, dear?’
Harold leant down. ‘Here Alice. Right next to you.’
‘Who is the lady with the pretty legs, darling? Doesn’t she have pretty legs.’
Harold chuckled. ‘I think so too.’ The fingers strengthened their hold on Apryl’s shoulder. She lacked the strength to swallow.
‘This is Apryl. A friend of ours, Alice. A friend. Tell her about Felix.’
Alice sighed. ‘Such a beautiful face. To lose it like that. We all thought him so handsome. And he painted the most wonderful puppets. Not for children, dear. No. Puppets in boxes. Stuck inside things, you know. But their faces you never forgot. I still see them.’
‘It can be hard to follow, especially the dates,’ Harold whispered, his mephitic breath hot against the left side of her face. ‘But sometimes what she says is extraordinary. I have no doubt at all that she knew Hessen. She was his model. One of the few he used.’
Apryl coughed and writhed inside her own skin under the onslaught of Harold’s breath. She tried to pull away but could get no further than the brim of Alice’s hat.
‘And the dancing,’ Alice said, suddenly, her eyes widening. ‘Oh, the dancing and chanting. You know. The most wonderful dancing. At his flat. Backwards dancing. Under the pictures, you know. Oh, the times we had.’ Alice leaned towards Apryl’s ear. ‘But it all stopped when they took him away. They were so cruel to him. It was terrible, dear.’