MASQUES OF SATAN (17 page)

‘The one doesn’t follow from the other,’ said Marcus. ‘It is perfectly possible for something to be a projection of the human psyche and, at the same time, absolutely real.’

‘It depends what you call real,’ I said, which I think was a pretty sound contribution to the debate.

‘I would define it as that which is both true and possesses lasting value and significance.’

Well, that was good enough for me, but my wife was not happy. Once Josie gets bitten by a book she becomes fiercely loyal to it. She was not going to let Professor Hawkins sink beneath the waves on the say-so of a mere Conservative MP
.

‘This is all very theoretical,’ she said, ‘but you must give me an example of what you mean by a ghost that is both a psychological projection and real.’

‘Well, I can, from experience,’ he said.

‘You mean, you’ve seen a ghost?’ This was tremendous news.

Marcus said: ‘I prefer not to call it a ghost: such a loaded term. I’d rather call it my Road From Damascus experience.’

* * * * *

When I came down from Oxford with a very mediocre degree, the usual things beckoned: merchant banks, the foreign office, the BBC, but none of them appealed. I was still not quite sure of who or what I was.  I felt the need for what I then rather foolishly called ‘real life’, but as you rightly say, Robert, it depends what you mean by ‘real.’  I had done a good deal of theatre at university and was still mad on acting, so I thought I would become an actor, at least for a while. It would be an interesting profession and one which would allow me to see all sorts and conditions of men, so I took a postgraduate course at the Webber-Douglas, found an agent, and embarked on my career.

Some people have said rather paradoxically that one of my misfortunes in life has been that I have always been lucky. ‘He’s had to take the smooth with the smooth,’ was one phrase used of me, I believe. Well, I dispute that, and anyway I would contend that mostly we make our own good and bad luck, but it is certainly true that I had some good fortune when I was starting out as an actor. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I am now. I did some decent rep in the days when there still was rep, and, a couple of years into my career I found myself playing a number of nice small parts in a very prestigious production at the Round House of
The Good Woman of Setzuan
. The play is by Brecht, and, in case you didn’t know, it’s the one about the Chinese tart.

You probably never saw the production, but it was a big noise at the time because the lead was being played by Sonia Tombs, who had formed her own company to put it on. Well, Sonia was a star, as you know, and she still is, but in those days — I’m talking about 1978 — she was not only already on the summit, but also a fantastically beautiful young woman: tall, raven haired, Valkyrie features, the lot.

I could write a book about Sonia. She was, and still is, an amazing actress and an amazing woman. Only one element in her make-up aroused suspicion in the theatrical world and perhaps held her back: her politics. It was, after all, the reason why she had decided to do the Brecht, and why she had formed her own company. Every management she had approached with the project had very politely turned her down.

As it happened, they were wrong. The show was a roaring success, but I don’t want to talk about that. Sonia was good to work with because she put her egalitarian principles into practice and treated each member of the company, from the highest to the lowest, as equals. Admittedly this didn’t go so far as giving everyone an equal share of the profits, but one must draw the line somewhere. She was fun to be with too. It has been said that Sonia has no sense of humour, and this is true, but she had a natural exuberance and gaiety which is a very fair substitute. At times, however, her political convictions used to kick in and led to some rather sticky moments. I remember one in particular which had consequences for me.

Between the matinée and evening show on the Saturday a group of company members, Sonia included, used to go to a nearby ‘greasy spoon’ café for tea and toast and fish and chips. It was one of the high points of the week for me, a moment of pure, unpretentious fun and comradeship. We were feeling exhilarated by a performance done and not too tired out to be looking forward to the last performance of the week, which was always a packed house. We felt we meant something; we felt alive. Conversation was usually trivial actor’s talk about tiny incidents during the show and theatrical gossip, but one Saturday, three weeks into the run, it was different.

There were, I suppose, eight or nine of us crammed around a single table, and the waitress who came to take our order was not, as it usually was, the middle-aged wife of the café’s Cypriot proprietor, but a young girl, at a guess no more than eighteen. She was quite tall, but pale and wispy, and though I did not notice this immediately, she was obviously very tired. In the presence of so much energy she wilted even more. Actors have loud voices, and we were ordering, and then changing our minds. ‘I’ll have fish and chips, as usual — No! Double egg and chips, please. And — wait a minute — a round of toast. Tea of course. A pot, please. None of your coffee: good God, no!’ Only Sonia noticed that the girl was not bearing up well under the strain of the café’s neon lighting, the steam, the cacophony of young careless voices. She put a hand caressingly on the girl’s arm.

‘Are you okay, love?’

The girl looked at Sonia and I saw the shock of recognition, and then fear on her face. Having ordered the rest of us to shut up, Sonia asked the girl to take a chair and sit down to take the order. The girl refused and stood immobile, seemingly paralysed. Sonia began to interrogate her. When had her shift begun? Had she had a proper break? When did she last eat? How old was she, and how much was she being paid?

This made the girl even more uncomfortable, perhaps because she was afraid that Sonia’s solicitude might lose her her job. She answered Sonia’s first three questions evasively in a barely audible voice, but she would not respond at all to the last two.

Impulsively, Sonia got up and marched into the kitchen to get some answers from Iannis, the proprietor. Meanwhile the girl took our orders. We spoke to her quietly and politely, feeling subdued and a little guilty. Presently Sonia returned.

‘I’ve had a word with Iannis. As I thought, she’s been on since lunchtime without a proper break. It’s disgraceful exploitation. This is the sort of thing that is bringing the country to its knees. I think we ought to boycott this place in protest. You’ve got here in microcosm the whole reason why Capitalism is rotten to the core . . .’

I can’t remember the rest of what she said, but it was a rant. It left us profoundly uneasy, and fearful too that this delightful period of relaxation between the shows was going to be violated by some turgid political harangue. We had to get her off the subject. During an awkward pause Tom Carter, with whom I shared a dressing room, came up with an idea.

‘Hey, Marcus,’ he said. ‘Show us that cap you bought today.’

The cap had already become a bit of a joke in our dressing room. Before the Saturday show I had been wandering about the stalls at Camden Lock, which is a couple of hundred yards down the road from the Round House. My eye had been taken by one of those black leather caps with shiny peaks, of the kind you now only see worn by moustachioed, leather clones in gay bars, but which in those days were more generally favoured, especially by those with leftist leanings. There are pictures of Lenin and other Bolsheviks — even Stalin, I believe — sporting similar headgear. I had no politics at all at that time, and I just thought it suited me. Perhaps it was an unconscious assertion of identity, of rebellion against my tidy, moneyed background, but I don’t think so. However, when I showed it to my fellow actors in the dressing room before the show I was told that I was a poseur, a ‘wanker’, and was generally laughed at. That is why I had not worn it on the way to the greasy spoon, but had just stuffed it in the pocket of my donkey jacket in case it rained. Tom had spotted this.

So, knowing that at least it would get Sonia off the subject of Worker’s Exploitation, I produced the cap. It did much to break the ice. The company immediately divided itself into two noisy factions. The larger one, headed by Tom, said it was pretentious and ‘naff’, but Sonia and a few others came to my defence. ‘Put it on,’ she kept saying. ‘Go on! Put it on!’

I put it on.

‘There! Look at that!’ said Sonia triumphantly. ‘I think it suits you absolutely brilliantly.’ It was charming of her. I thought at the time she came to my aid simply because she hated to see anyone bullied or teased, but later I was to take a more cynical view.

In the interval of the evening performance, Sonia drew me aside. If she had been charming to me in the greasy spoon, she was even nicer to me now. She told me how much she liked my performance, my enthusiasm, my dedication to the company. Following the success of the Brecht she was planning further productions; this time touring Chekhov, perhaps even Shakespeare around the country. She seemed to be taking me into her confidence. I was flattered. She had a habit of fixing you with an intense, almost unblinking gaze that was both alluring and disconcerting at the same time. Then she mentioned that her brother Ed, a lecturer at the LSE was giving a talk the following afternoon, a Sunday. Would I be interested in coming along? After all she had said it would have been rude to refuse her; and to invent an excuse under the gaze of those wild green eyes was unthinkable, but I knew what it meant.

She and her brother Ed, an academic economist of some repute, were co-founders of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, or the R.S.W.P for short. It was never a very large organisation, even at its zenith, but thanks to Sonia’s name and cash it hit the headlines fairly often. So, you see, I knew that I was being invited to a meeting whose chief aim was recruitment. I went, fully aware of the dangers, but thinking that I could show a moderate interest, sufficient to guarantee me a place on that Chekhov tour, without having to bind myself hand and foot to dogma and party. These are the kind of best laid plans, I find, that always go awry.

The talk was given in a seminar room at the LSE. I remember a dreary nicotine- and dung-coloured room, with clanking chairs and neon lights that made everyone look pale and ill. Someone had turned up the heating too high, and the windows, which looked out onto a dingy internal well, refused to open. Sonia came in late and sat at the back, ostentatiously, it seemed to me, demonstrating her humble assumption of the role of disciple to her brother.

Ed Tombs was as tall as his sister, but otherwise bore little resemblance to her. His features were coarser, his black hair curlier and more untidy. He was balding, and sported a beard of nondescript type. He wore pale, shapeless clothes. There was something appealing to me about his obvious lack of personal vanity. I had yet to learn that such carelessness often conceals a far deeper vein of  self-regard.

He told us that Capitalist society was on the verge of extinction. You’ve got to remember that this was the end of the seventies, in the chaotic Callaghan era just before Thatcher and the collapse of Soviet Communism, so the thesis was by no means as implausible as it seems now. He explained the ideals of the R.S.W.P., which were simple and radical. Workers would seize the means of production and ‘expropriate’ the giant corporations. Do you know the word ‘expropriate’? Handy term. It’s the one Stalin used to dignify his bank robberies when he was a revolutionary. The society ushered in would be just and, of course, supremely democratic, ruled by a series of workers’ councils, guided by a central praesidium, annually elected. It all sounded admirably fair and simple. The problem is that the revolutionary socialist society, like any such system, secular or religious, is a straitjacket. Human nature is far too varied and excitable to respond well to any kind of dogmatic regime. But in those days I was a stranger to human nature; my expensive education had seen to that. I knew next to nothing about myself, so how could I be expected to know anything about other people?

Ed was, in his way a very good speaker: I suppose he had that much in common with Sonia, though his talent was differently manifested. He expressed himself clearly, forcefully, without resorting to sloppily emotional phraseology, or cliché. He had the gift of passionate rationality; and in a world where Irrationality sits on a double throne next to his brother Injustice, that is very appealing, especially to a painfully inexperienced young man, as I was at the time.

Well, I offer no more excuses: the long and the short of it was that by the end of Ed’s talk I was a convert. I had had my Road to Damascus experience. Factors other than Ed’s evangelical logic had played their part: my deep admiration for Sonia, my own lack of a sense of who I was, the intensity of the atmosphere, even the excessive heat that emanated in waves from the old cast iron radiators. It was as if two hot dry hands had been pressed against my temples, forcing me to listen. I knew I had a headache, but it didn’t seem to matter. I found I was being talked to by a severe looking young woman called Deirdre, with short, straight hair. She, I later discovered, had been assigned to me to complete my indoctrination.