Surrender to Mr. X (26 page)

Bernie would sometimes come with his boyfriend—a French North African, I reckoned—very young, black, beautiful and sulky. Arts-Intrinsick was making over Bernie's place in Mayfair to house his growing collection of South American art. It was a big deal, and was going to fit in nicely after the work on Lady Daisy's show was done. Alden was in a benign mood, the more so because he had finally delivered his piece to Radio 3 where it had been well received, though he still waited for the overall program to be green lit. But all were confident this would be the case.

Bernie brought round some stuff, a newly discovered hallucinogen from yet another “rare plant in the rain forest.” Chemists were trying to synthesize it but running into trouble. Bernie was a consultant to a Russian billionaire, an oil oligarch, seeking to acquire great swathes of the world's art works—so such freebies came his way from time to time. Alden offered to give it a test run, since Bernie was obviously nervous. It was meant to deliver a blend of amphetamine and soporific with a peppering of the visionary, leading to easy, intensified sexual gratification. Ray stuck to ordinary black hashish on the grounds that he did not want his artistic judgment compromised so near to Day Zero. Alden and I tried it but it didn't do a thing for either of us. We decided the billionaire was being had: but neither Bernie nor his billionaire sponsor would be pleased to hear that, so we went along with their expectations and
said it was great stuff. Well, you don't like to mess with oligarchs and Alden had a vested interest in keeping things running smoothly with Bernie.

It was a little lie, but one which was going to come back and haunt me. There is a kind of natural justice out there in the world: Alden and Ray went to great lengths to subvert it with their Ophidian currents, their Crowleyanity, their numbered Paths to Wisdom and so on, but they would have done better just to let things alone and accept them, not try to wrest power out of an unblinking universe.

Because there was then, suddenly—Trouble. It seemed the build-up of paint on the large canvas of
The Blue Box
was causing cracks to occur in the glue which held the wooden frames in place, so the mirrors themselves were cracking and in two cases had shattered completely: when one went it had a domino effect. Six would be affected. Lam could deal with the cracked glass well enough but the wooden frames had taken months and needed Ray's creative input. Ray stamped and swore and tore his hair; Alden said wait for Lam to get back and do it: Ray talked about authenticity and it was Alden's turn to say “fuck authenticity, what about my opening?”

Work on the painting stopped. I felt obscurely to blame. The painting had a memory of the damage I had done: now it was repeating it of its own accord.

Worse, Radio 3 had not green-lit Alden's work: it had received only an orange light. Proceed with
caution. The Program's head of music, himself a rival minimalist composer of note, had suggested Alden “make changes.” Alden was outraged, even if not all the news was bad: Daisy had heard the piece and loved it and it would be having its premier at the opening as planned.

But it was bad enough. And again, I felt it was my fault. I had failed to deliver. My passion and my pain had not been of concert standard.

And they looked at me, I, their muse, in a way that I knew I had to come up with something.

L
AM CAME HOME AND
I was sent home for the weekend. Early September and just a hint of autumn in the air: the smell of bonfires drifted across common and woodland. I realized how much I'd missed my family. My mother asked me how my holiday had been, and I remembered in time I'd said I was going to Thailand. She wondered when I was going back into academia and I said I didn't think I was. She sighed and said it was a waste of a good brain.

Katharine and Alison asked my advice. They'd been reading Ovid's Art of Love in Latin. They wanted to know how to lose their virginities. They thought perhaps they were missing out on full appreciation of the texts. I told them that if they just stood around in pubs and did a bit of binge drinking it would happen soon enough. “We've tried that,” they said. “Nothing happens.”

I was not surprised. They did look a little odd. They'd looked better in the photographs. In real life
they were so pale, thin and flat-chested, you could hardly tell the difference between them and their background. And they hated to be parted. So different from myself. Could my parents have been telling lies? Perhaps I wasn't my father's daughter? Or perhaps the twins were not his?

“Dad's still having that affair,” said Alison.

“With your friend Jude,” said Katharine. “You shouldn't ever have brought her home.”

“You shouldn't ever have run and told,” I said. The twins had done some detective work and found out Jude had just had a little baby. A boy. They had moved into a cottage five miles away.

“We think it's Daddy's baby,” said Alison.

“Jude calls herself Mrs. but she isn't,” said Katharine.

“He visits her on Wednesday lunchtimes, while Mummy's taking midweek Eucharist.”

They wanted to know if they should tell our mother or not.

“No!” I said. “Just shut up and perhaps it will all go away.”

They danced around on their skinny legs and called me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial. Why did they have to play detective? Why did they have to stir things up? I wished they'd get themselves boyfriends and turn into proper people, and not wear National Health glasses. But they couldn't even see anything wrong with them.

Robert was next. He came sobbing to me to ask my
advice. His zits were making him unattractive to women. Our mother was trying to cure them with homeopathic remedies which weren't working. I suggested he went to see Dr. Barky who would give him antibiotics. He said he thought Dr. Barky was gay. I said I really didn't think he was. Robert said he'd tried to get it on with an older woman but it hadn't worked. I asked him how much older and he said about your age. I said he should concentrate on young women, and ask Dr. Barky for Viagra while he was about it.

Robert “yes, but”-ed., as he had since he was small. Yes but, Vanessa, supposing I'm really gay? I said there's nothing wrong with being gay. He said eagerly did I think so? I said it saved an awful lot of money on child care. But perhaps he should wait and see what he was, he was only sixteen. The immediate and major worry was the acne.

He said yes but, Vanessa, Jude had said she didn't mind the zits, they should try again, but actually she rather disgusted him. He couldn't understand why women had to have breasts. He'd quite fancy me if I didn't have them.

“Did you say Jude?” I asked and he said yes, that was her name. He thought I knew her. He'd met her outside the local Garden Center and she was crying because of some man. They'd got into conversation and she asked Robert to cheer her up behind the potting sheds. He hadn't wanted to, but she was so miserable he thought he ought. It hadn't worked.

It had for my father, more's the pity, I thought.

Robert said he was getting very neurotic about the gay thing. He kept thinking he had a dreadful smell coming from his ass and his friends avoided him. I said he'd probably been smoking too much dope. He said yes but Vanessa, he'd seen a documentary on television about borderline schizophrenia, and some of his symptoms seemed right. And so on. Yes but. Yes but.

I took the early train back to London on Sunday night. My mother didn't see me off at the station: she was taking Evensong, swanning around in white and gold vestments. I wished she'd take more notice of me, and my father too.

Parents never get it right. There's either too much of them or too little of them. And the visit had stirred up Vanessa.

T
HEY WERE WAITING FOR
me when I came back. I let myself in the door with a cheerful “Hi, you guys! I'm back.” But the whole mood of the house had changed. The hum was booming through it at full blast: the sound now had a double thread to it: the low notes were lower and I supposed Alden had achieved his ninety-three hertz, greeting of the Thelemites, (ninety-three being the Gematrian, or numerological reduction of the Greek words “Thelemy”—will, and “Agape,” love—Vanessa was back, all right. She reckoned Crowley rented rooms in Jermyn Street because the cheese shop happened to be at No. 93, and so it took his fancy and impressed others, even though it meant he and Rosa had to climb four flights to get to them). But now there was also a shriller note as well, overlaying and threading through the whole, which was to me rather horrible, putting me in mind of my time under the lash of the cat-o-nine tails. Perhaps, if this was the piece Alden had submitted to Radio 3, it was understandable that
the head of department wanted “changes.” Perhaps, as it was, it just made him uneasy. Perhaps the new piece delighted Lady Daisy because she was a more sincere masochist than I could ever be.

I would have preferred Alden to have been motivated by personal and sexual gratification, even at my expense, than the pursuit of the En Garde. This was the problem with going home: what seems normal in one place is simply not in another. One gets stirred up. But I was given no time to think about these things. Apparently I had done wrong. I was sent to my room with Lam, who stripped me, cuffed my hands behind my back and took me up to sit next to Ray on the blue sofa, with Alden facing me in his chair.

“Bad girl,” said Lam on the way, by way of explanation. “Wash quilt wrong.”

It seemed the spectroanalyser—one of Lukas's developments, an instrument that combined the functions of both spectrometer and a spectrum analyser for low frequencies—had detected some red in the pure white of the quilt. White enough for the naked eye, that is to say, but not for Alden's sensors. They had pieced together what had happened. I confessed. A red thong in the washing machine by mistake. But I'd been told to take the quilt to the cleaners. So why was it in the washing machine? Disobedience!

“I mended it,” I said. “No harm was done.” And then of course it came out that some of the squares had been shrunk and others stretched because of the thirty
degree wash. I sat there while Ray and Alden gave me little cross pinches with their nails. But it did not get any worse than that. There was a cracking sound and another of the tiny mirrors on
The Blue Box
slipped out of its frame, and saved me, before it did.

Lam attended to it. Alden forgave me, but with a warning.

“It is very important, Joan,” he said, “that you do exactly as we tell you. Not just follow some approximation of your own. You don't have the wit or wisdom.”

And he put a cigarette in my mouth, and when he lit it I could tell what was in it from the cedary smell: Bernie's new drug. It didn't do anything much, I knew, so I inhaled and held my breath. Lam untied my hands and gave me a silk wrap—a Zedzz organza with a few sequins, a snip at
£99—
which didn't hide much but was better than nothing—and they put the family snaps up on the screen. And I knew what this was all about: what I was meant to come up with. And I wasn't going to be party to it.

But Ray did his old trick of looking into my eyes. He had advanced a path or claimed to have—rather to have shifted over via the fifth stage to the fifth sphere, so his power was intensified to the fifth degree. Oh my God, bleated Vanessa, don't say they're into Steiner. Steiner was a high initiate of Crowley's original OTO, before he diverted to the Rosicrucians. Stage five—the Mystic Death, the descent into hell. Bet that's what
Ray sees himself as going through. The torment of the artist on the way to the oneness. This Southgate lot, protests Vanessa, are renegades: all-purpose polymorphous occultists: anything will do. But she seems slightly mollified at the mention of Steiner: at least he wasn't into human sacrifice, only growing crops by the phases of the moon. Although Walther Darré, Hitler's Minister For Agriculture, who invented the term “organic gardening” developed the idea from Steiner's “bio-dynamics”: Rudolph Hess was a fan, and the German Steiner schools were under his protection until he flew to Scotland. Shut up, Vanessa, thought Joan.

“Okay Joan,” says Ray. “Holiday's over. You're under will.”

After that it's snapshots. Bernie and his companion have come round. Five men, one woman in a diaphanous gown. But of the men two of them are gay, one of them a potential alien, one of them unable to come and the other one a premature ejaculator; all are searching for the secret of the Holy Grail, as well they might. Bernie is disappointed that the rain forest drug isn't doing much for anyone: there is a lot of money invested in its research and development.

Bernie is having a hard time from his boyfriend Naz. Naz doesn't much like coming over to our house and lets it be known. He's bored and off-hand, and tapping his foot, and just wants to get out of there. Art's not his bag and he's not bothering to make Bernie think
it is. This relationship's going nowhere, it's not hard to tell. It's run its course, and Bernie is going to be left feeling dull, stale and old unless he quickly finds some diversion. In the end money and the adoration of an older man is not enough. Enchantment, lust and excitement beckon, not to mention the call of the new. I know the feeling. Bernie was the one wanting to please: well, it is always the older one, isn't it.

Snapshot. Five men and one girl looking at photos of my little brother Robert in the garden, laughing and sweaty, half naked and with perfect teeth. And I'd just been worrying about the twins.

“You're pathetic,” said Naz to Bernie. “If you think I'm going to be jealous of that. I don't believe I'm gay anyway. You just told me I was.”

“I suppose you want her, then,” said Bernie, indicating little diaphanous me, with distaste. “Presumably that's what she's here for.”