To the Devil - a Diva! (16 page)

‘For heaven's sake, Fox,' Magda had grunted. ‘Would you ask her to put a sock in it?'

When I hammered and called this time, there came no reassuring words from my aunt, inviting me to mind my own business, assuring me she was actually fine. She simply kept on wailing and keening as if pursued by Beelzebub himself. Somewhere in the back of my fuddled mind I was wondering if Aunt Helen was plagued with the same vile nightmares that I had suffered since childhood. Perhaps they were just another familial inheritance.

Now she sounded as if she were in the throes of agony. I could even hear her thrashing about on her bed. That couldn't be any good for a lady of her years.

So I took a deep breath, took hold of the brass doorknob and clicked open the door.

Inside there was just a spill of milky moonlight from under the ill-fitting curtains. I waited till my eyes gradually became used to the dark. Here the noise was much worse. The old girl was really letting rip. She was squawking and caterwauling fit to burst and, as I had suspected, she was flinging herself about with abandon in her four-poster bed. I was frozen into immobility. Somehow, observing such a bizarre spectacle seemed to me distasteful, even obscene. It looked as if my octogenarian aunt was in the fevered and passionate grip of some phantom lover. Her nightgown was awfully rucked up.

I told myself: be a man. I steeled my nerves and hastened to her bedside.

Instantly Great Aunt Helen fell silent and still. Her bright blue eyes flew open and fixed me with a terrible look. She said, very distinctly: ‘He will not get out of me. My head
feels like it will burst with the pressure of him. I am so scared, Fox. You have to help me. You must help me.'

Then she passed out cold on her rumpled, perspiration sodden sheets. How odd, I remember thinking, that her words to me had been so composed and exact. And I also felt as if, by stepping up to that grand bed and listening to those weirdly calm sentences, I had taken my first real step into a story from which I would never escape.

The following morning I decided that, if Aunt Helen attempted once more to pretend that nothing untoward had occurred, I would confront her. Magda egged me on, as she briskly powdered her face at the gorgeous dressing table. I glanced at her reflection in that mottled looking glass and received a sudden impression of how my beloved might look when old. The ambience of the manor and my aunt's peculiar habits were getting to us both. But Magda's voice held steady as she instructed me: ‘Have it out with her, Fox. Otherwise I'm going straight off to London. I'm not staying in the middle of nowhere with some horrible shrieking old woman.' Then my darling heart turned her attention to her new Norwich-bought boots, which had little buttons all up the sides.

I bearded my great aunt in her den. She was writing letters in her study. In the wash of morning light from the french windows she looked very drawn and wan. I felt a slight satisfaction that there was none of yesterday's dissemblance. As we faced each other across her desk it was obvious that we both remembered and acknowledged what had passed in the depths of the night.

‘I want to know what this is all about,' I said, palms flat and sweating on the worn, cool desk.

As if in relief, my aunt sagged a little in her chair. Her resolve was melting. She could see that she now had a man to depend upon. I was gratified by this. I was there to help her.

She asked me, ‘Has Magda heard my cries?'

‘She is as concerned as I am, Aunt Helen,' I said stiffly. Really, I look back and I must have been such a pompous ass. So full of myself. I was convinced I could protect my formidable Aunt.

‘That girl is not worthy of you,' my aunt said. ‘You know that, Fox. She has her sights set high and you have given in to her. She is the first woman who would let you do as you would with her and you have made the mistake of promising her the earth. So grateful are you for her favours. I imagine that you will regret that, nephew.'

I felt myself grow red with embarrassment, and then fury. But I couldn't get any words out in retaliation.

‘She is common, Fox. All too common. Hasn't she wondered at all why I have let the two of you share a room under my roof before you are married? Has she not questioned anything?'

I was reverting to a schoolboy. I was mortified. ‘Magda realises that my upbringing, my education, were unorthodox … and she herself is a very modern girl …'

‘A whore,' said my aunt simply.

Our gazes locked and I was speechless.

‘You mention your education, Fox, and how it might be seen as unorthodox. There was a reason you were sent there. All that way north, to that particular establishment.'

I frowned. Aunt Helen had never mentioned my schooling
for a long time, had never gone into its particulars, though it had been her signature on the monthly cheques. Until I had left and found myself at Oxford I hadn't thought my alma mater at all out of the ordinary run of things. But recently I had seen that it was. Nobody I knew had been to such a school as I had.

Do what thy wilt be the whole of the Law. The first, most important rule of the school. The only important law in the world. Because of my education in the north, human love and sexual relations – human passions of every sort – held no mysteries or fears for me. Everything was natural and easy and I counted myself lucky to find a young woman like Magda who wasn't put off by the things I took for granted.

‘You were sent to be schooled as have generations of Soamses. You were sent there for a particular purpose.'

‘I see,' I said, though I didn't at all.

‘You were sent there so as to be untrammelled by workaday morality. So that your spirit would be free and open to the universe.'

Her words discomfited me. She seemed so passionate and earnest. People of my generation were always put off by talk that grew too earnest. Magda and I belonged to that peer group that came between the two world wars and we were determined not to let anything matter as much as all that.

What could I say to this old woman? Protest that my spirit was indeed unfettered? I baulked at such words.

‘You were put there to be educated properly. To venerate the name of the Lord of This World.'

Well, that was easy to take on board. I had never questioned the religion of my upbringing, though I had perhaps, neglected it of late.

‘You have chosen one of the uninitiated as your bride-
to-be
,' said Great Aunt Helen, calmly licking a stamp. ‘Even you must realise that she will have to be brought in.'

My throat was dry. ‘Of course.' I was shocked to hear how she took it all so seriously. I had no idea what to be ‘brought in' entailed. I thought, with no living relative apart from my haggard aunt, I had escaped all trappings of tradition. Apparently not.

She nodded at me with some satisfaction. ‘There will be a gathering. Here. This Saturday night. People will come from all corners to attend. We can have Magda initiated then. Since you are so set upon taking her as your bride.' Her expression was rather fierce at this and I knew I couldn't argue. ‘You will inform her, Fox. You will let her know what is likely to happen to her.'

‘Very well,' I acquiesced. The details, however, were somewhat hazy to me. I cursed myself for never having paid much attention to my divinity classes.

My Great Aunt Helen's face softened and, for a moment, I could imagine that she gazed on me almost fondly. ‘One more thing, Fox. To do with what I told you last night. When I was in the midst of my … distress.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘It is to do with the pressure on my brain. That is the most urgent of my concerns. The demon in possession of my immortal soul is making himself a rather uncomfortable lodger. You must help me relieve myself of that encumbrance.'

I was an idiot. ‘Indeed?'

‘During the Saturday night ceremony. As my closest living blood relation on this earthly plane. You must take the sacred implement and punch a hole into my skull. Help me bleed
the excess spirit away. The Brethren will, of course, coach you through the exact procedure.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘I see.'

‘You don't mind, do you, dear? I realise that it sounds rather grisly …'

‘No, no, not at all …'

‘But it has, as I've said, become a rather pressing matter.' She took up her fountain pen with a flourish, preparing to dismiss me from her presence. ‘It really is quite straightforward. Our family have been opening up their skulls for generations. That is what keeps us open to the universe. To the divine word and breath of the Lord of This World himself.'

I smiled. ‘Quite,' I said.

‘Well, off you toddle.' She smiled benignly. ‘You hurry off and tell that little strumpet of yours what a treat she has in store for her, hm?'

So then I turned on my heel and left my great aunt to her stack of correspondence. The study door snicked shut at my heels. I was alone in the gloom of the corridor, my mind a sickening whirl. It was Thursday now. Saturday sounded as if it was going to be rather hectic.

And all of a sudden I felt like screaming.

So.

You come again to hear another of my fireside tales. You draw up your chair and hold out your balloon glass so expectantly, ready for these heady fumes.

Let us sit together in this stifling warm study air. And you profess not to enjoy stories like these. You believe you credit them with no truth nor validity in this rational age. But here you are back.

How I reel you in. Just as I did when I was a bestseller. When sturdy businessmen bought me at airport stalls and sat in a chill sweat of fear in air-conditioned and pressurised cabins, high above the earth. Or housewives, at home at the kitchen table, neglecting their daily chores for the sake of gobbling up every morsel I lovingly prepared for them. All that Satanism, all that witchcraft. Oh, they knew what they were getting when they sat down to listen to my voice. Just as, years later, cinema audiences came to sit in the dark and watch my terrible tales unspool on the smutty gauze of the screen. Boys and girls would clutch each other on the back row, chilled to the bone as adepts and ghosthunters stalked each other through the thousand wicked nights of my imagination. Those hormones stirred and thrilled and trembled in pleasure palaces the world over. A million gropings and fingerings went on in my name and the fear I inspired. A great deal of unharnessed naughtiness was spurred and engendered by plots set in motion by me.

Oh, though I sought to warn the world of the devil's dark motives, my stories themselves pushed my audience to give into their fears, their desires, their wildest dreams. I got them all going. I got them to give in.

Just as you have. Coming to sit here, beside me again.

You want to know more. Like they all do. And I, decrepit raconteur, savouring my brandy, thinking back to where we got to in this latest, oldest tale, I let my hampered mind drift back and back on the eddies and tides of myriad ironies …

Ah. I'd had my little interview with Aunt Helen. In this very room. At that very walnut desk. Didn't I tell you that one day I would inherit the manor?

But you have a modern sensibility. Not for you some
long and weighty exegesis on witchcraft and the cabbalistic tradition. If you are interested you will simply insert a few key words into a – what do you call them? A search engine? – and pull out a few bizarre and probably misinformed virtual documents. Then you might learn how Satan had come to be Lord of This World. And how some people come to follow the Left Hand Path, as they call it. Or you might consult these volumes in this study of mine. Everything you might need is right here. Grimoires, everything. Books you might not come across or even be able to request in your local lottery-sponsored Millennium library. All of the important works are, of course, in private hands.

You want to be pressing on with the story. You want to involve yourself in the human element: the character-driven plot. And why shouldn't you? Why shouldn't you want to learn how my sweetheart took the news that she was, within the next two days, to be somehow initiated?

Of her own account, she had grown nosy and intrigued that morning. She was that kind of girl and that was one of the reasons I wanted her. She was just the type – resourceful, independent, thoroughly, thoroughly modern in every way – to support me in my literary endeavours and (I felt sure) my marvellously successful career as a writer of popular novels.

While I had been consulting my Great Aunt Helen, Magda had been browsing in the library. Now, she wasn't really one for books (as I was to discover) but sheer boredom and irksomeness that morning in the stately pile had driven her to the extreme measure of plucking out several hidebound volumes and glancing through them in the hope of finding something marginally distracting. She had flicked, first sighing, exasperated by page after page of impenetrable text,
and then she felt herself compelled to look further. To look at the pictures, to scan through the writing itself. My Magda was shocked, awed, appalled.

I found her red-cheeked and hissing. ‘These books are absolutely filthy!' She thrust one example under my nose. It quivered in her grasp and I could see a large number of other, similar volumes, splayed open on the table behind her. ‘Your aunty hasn't got a single decent book in this whole place. They are all utterly vile.'

I was attempting to focus on a black and white etching on the page she held shaking before me. In that plate, a number of winged beasts were circling around a naked and corpulent woman. One of them appeared to be squatting on her, but that was about all I could make out.

‘Rare editions,' I said, paling under Magda's affronted gaze. ‘My family has made a habit of collecting them up.'

She wasn't about to let ancestry and tradition assuage her. Collecting up big houses with neatly-laid grounds and respectable treasures was one thing. Dirty old books were quite another.