MASQUES OF SATAN (27 page)

On the first Friday in June last year she rang to ask if I were coming to her the following day. ‘I want you to meet someone who’ll interest you, I think,’ she said. It was a familiar phrase, one I had come to dread, because it usually meant a woman whom Aunt Dora considered might be suitable for me to marry. My Aunt was a passionate advocate for the state of marriage, though her brief ecstatic experience of it, which she had never attempted to repeat, hardly qualified her as an expert on the subject. Where Aunt Dora found these candidates for my hand I never discovered, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them, all perfectly nice, often divorced with a child or two, but usually very nervous, for some reason, especially when I explained to them that I lecture in Philosophy at University College, London and have written a book entitled
Towards a Definition of Meaning
. I am forty-five and do not intend to marry.

I have been told by a number of my acquaintances that I have no ‘intuition’. I don’t quite know what this means, which, I suppose, indicates that they may be right. Certainly I don’t, as a rule, take instant likings or dislikings to people in the way that others do. The idea of love at first sight seems to me quite bizarre; but I did once come close to hatred at first sight. It was that afternoon when I first met Norman Fand.

Even for this I can furnish a fairly rational explanation. When I arrived at the house shortly after six Dora’s door was opened to me by Peggy Wentworth, an elderly woman, one of my aunt’s small coterie of fans. She always treated me with deference, which I knew had nothing to do with my own achievements, and everything to do with the fact that I was Aunt Dora’s closest living relative. She was large, grey haired, and amiable, her print dress had on it a pattern of purple petunias as big as cabbages, and I am afraid she sickened me.

‘We are all in the back room,’ she said. ‘You’ve come just in time for the sherry.’ She winked at me roguishly, as if to imply that I had deliberately avoided the tea part of my Aunt’s At Home. I should explain that Aunt Dora had her tea party in her front parlour from four to six, at which time the company moved to the back drawing room for sherry and wine. It was one of those stylish little arrangements of hers which lent distinction and grace to everything she did.

I resented Peggy Wentworth’s implication, and still more her presumption of familiarity. Yes, I know I am a snob: you will have to accept that about me. I suppose this put me in a bad frame of mind for my first meeting with Norman Fand as I followed Peggy into the back drawing room. It was a fine summer evening, and the drawing room’s French windows were open to the garden beyond.

A stocky, stout, shortish man in his sixties, wearing a well-tailored, pale grey double-breasted suit was standing in front of the fireplace. He had so placed himself that he was inevitably the focus of attention to the dozen or so people present. Anyone who didn’t know the situation would have assumed that it was he, and not my Aunt Dora, who was the host. She was sitting to one side of the fireplace, staring up at him attentively.

It was this usurpation that first invited my prejudice. He had taken over my aunt’s home, and who was he? He was, of course, the famous direct voice medium Norman Fand, but this, to a lecturer in philosophy, means less than nothing.

He had a mean, blunt featured, truculent sort of face, much of which was hidden by heavy tortoiseshell-framed glasses. One might have taken him for a middle-ranking Trade Union official. His most distinctive feature was his hair, a thick white mane swept back from a low and furrowed brow. It was long enough to brush the collar of his suit at the back, and was so neatly combed and coifed that I wondered if he used hair lacquer.

I could not deny that he had a certain presence, a powerful egotistical vacuum towards which all the attention in the room was sucked. Sensing I would not be immune to the influence, I tried to concentrate on the others who were listening to his monologue. He was talking about his recently published memoirs, entitled, perhaps rather ungrammatically,
Me and My Voices
, and how he had been forced to sack the unfortunate ghost who had been hired by the publisher to assist him. ‘In the end, I wrote the whole book myself,’ he said, and went on to instruct us on the proper way to write an autobiography, personal experience having equipped him with the expertise.

My Aunt Dora was watching him closely. Like most writers who are lifelong observers, she had cultivated a look of courteous blandness in public, but I thought I detected the occasional twitch of amusement on her lips. It could have been wishful thinking. Other expressions in the room were less inscrutable, though the only one in which I could see unequivocal disgust was that of Sir Harvey Tarrant, or ‘old Sir Harvey Tarrant’, as Aunt Dora invariably called him, even though he was barely older than she was. He was a distinguished molecular biologist and a lifelong friend of my aunt’s, a neat, alert almost hairless man.

The others, who included a fair sprinkling of Aunt Dora’s lame dogs, were obviously captivated. Fand moved easily from the subject of his autobiography to anecdotes about the famous people he knew.  He was, it would seem, in the unique position of being on intimate terms with a number of living celebrities, at, admittedly, the more vulgar end of the spectrum, in addition to a number of dead ones. Among the dead his celebrity acquaintance was more distinguished, and included royalty.

There was one face I did not recognise and which seemed oddly out of place, a tall man in his thirties with a smooth face and dyed blonde hair. His clothes attempted flamboyant elegance, and a brightly coloured silk scarf was elaborately knotted around his neck. The expression on his face was one of rapt attention mingled with a certain proprietorial complacency. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that this was some kind of attendant or acolyte of Fand’s. His name was Carl.

When Fand’s monologue had come to a reasonably obvious close, my Aunt was very quick to forestall its resumption. She had spotted me, of course, as I came in to the room and now showed herself very anxious to introduce me to Fand. I shook his hot, wet chunk of hand.

‘Ah, yes. Your Aunt has told me all about you,’ said Norman. He had a deep, gravelly chest voice, like an old-fashioned actor’s, and an accent which had once been honest cockney but was now overlaid with the veneer of suburban refinement. I had the curious feeling that though his eyes were looking in my direction they were not really looking at me. ‘You’re the philosopher, aren’t you? I am in touch with quite a few philosophers on the other side. Mostly Chinese, but some English. Bertrand Russell came through at one of our recent sessions.’

‘I would have thought he would have been rather sceptical about that sort of thing. He certainly was in life.’ I hope that I had conveyed a certain light-hearted scorn without being downright rude. Subtlety, however, was wasted on Norman Fand.

‘Not now he isn’t. Bertie’s completely changed his tune.’

This impertinence enraged me, but I realised that it might have been calculated to do so, so I kept my temper. ‘I shall tell my colleagues,’ I said. ‘They will be fascinated to hear it.’

‘You do that,’ he said, then turning to Carl, who was now in close attendance: ‘I’ll have another glass of that very pleasant sherry, if I may.’ I was dismissed from the presence. The first round had gone to him.

I found Sir Harvey Tarrant in a corner, thoughtfully nibbling a Bath Oliver biscuit which Aunt Dora always served with sherry.

‘A new addition to our circle,’ I said.

‘The man’s a disease,’ said Sir Harvey. ‘Did you notice his fingernails?’ I had as a matter of fact. They had been expertly manicured and polished, evidently not something Sir Harvey approved of in a man. ‘We’d better keep an eye on him. I’m rather afraid Dora might prove susceptible.’

‘She has a pretty robust vein of common sense,’ I said.

‘Oh, I agree. One of the most level-headed people I know, in the ordinary way of things; but don’t forget, she
is
a woman.’

My aunt once told me that Sir Harvey had proposed to her after Anton’s death. It was a warm friendship, securely based on mutual esteem and misunderstanding.

II

One Sunday a fortnight later Aunt Dora invited me to lunch. It was just us two and we enjoyed the relaxed interludes of talk and silence that only old friends, or ‘relative friends’, as she once described our status, can enjoy. Blunt as my intuitions are, I was not completely immune to the sense that Aunt Dora may have been waiting to tell me something. She was a little more restless than she usually was. It came with coffee.

‘By the way,’ she said. ‘I went to a séance with Mr Fand. It was an unusual experience. I won’t go into details, but there seems to be a possibility that Anton is going to come through from the other side. Now don’t give me that look, Geoffrey. I know it sounds absurd. And, yes, I know Norman Fand is rather a horrid little man. I haven’t completely lost my marbles, as you moderns say. That’s why I want you to come with me this afternoon. He’s having another of his sessions at four o’clock.’

In the end I agreed to accompany her. I felt that she would be safer with me than without me, and I tried to keep the proverbial ‘open mind’, whatever that may mean.

Aunt Dora’s house on Highgate Hill is in a terrace of semi-detached houses called Larch Avenue. It is situated on a slope, and three doors further down was Fand’s house. Not having far to walk we arrived rather promptly and were ushered into the house by Carl, who was wearing a sky-blue cardigan. He spoke in the hushed tones of a confidential valet. 

‘Norman is relaxing as usual before our afternoon meeting.’ He pointed at a door on the left side of the entrance hall. The room to which it gave access must have been the one which looked out onto the front garden, the equivalent of my aunt’s dining room. I had noticed as we came up the path to the house that the windows of the room in question were heavily curtained. ‘He loves the old silence,’ Carl added. 

I must have looked puzzled at this unexpectedly thoughtful and poetic statement. ‘The old silent films,’ Carl explained. I understood: ‘silents’ not ‘silence’. ‘He has a projector and a screen and a collection of old silent films, and he watches them in there It puts him in a relaxed, receptive spirit for our meetings. He loves those old silents. Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino. Ivor Novello. Theda Bara. He’s in touch with a lot of them, you know, on the other side. Clara Bow is a real darling. We sometimes have trouble with Rudolph, especially if Ramon has been in contact. But Ivor is a real gentleman. He has quite a collection of signed photos of the old silent stars. Would you like to see them?’

He led us down the corridor and into the sitting room at the back of the house. It was the equivalent of the room where Fand had held forth at my aunt’s. Curtains had been drawn across the French windows, and in the centre of the room chairs were already laid out in an oval for the afternoon’s séance. At one apex of the oval was a dining chair with arms, sometimes known as a ‘carver’, presumably the seat reserved for Fand’s use. Beside it on a low table was an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder and a microphone on a stand. The room was relatively bare otherwise, but the dark red walls were covered with framed photographs, many of them signed and dedicated to Fand. Carl pointed to one section of wall which was devoted to a parade of ancient film stars in their gauzy, silvery pride. Some like Valentino and Novarro were still just about known to the general public; others like Vilma Banky, Antonio Moreno, and Rod la Rocque were faint echoes of a forgotten era.

‘Most of them are signed, you see,’ said Carl. ‘But all done before death. Norman always makes a little joke about that, because, you see, he’s got to know quite a few of them on the other side, as I told you. But some of them did give him guidance about how to find signed photos of them at a reasonable price.’

‘How thoughtful of them,’ said Aunt Dora. That characteristic inflection of gentle irony reassured me. Carl smiled, happily insensible to such subtleties, then left the room to answer the doorbell.  Others were arriving for the séance. They trickled in, smiling and babbling: elderly, respectable, middle-aged, mainly female. I was mildly irritated to see Peggy Wentworth among the
galère
. She blended in perfectly, of course, but I did not like the idea of her having changed allegiance from my Aunt Dora to Norman Fand.

Presently Carl entered and clapped his hands. ‘Now, ladies and gents, please, Norman will be coming through shortly, so if we can take our seats quietly. Now, most of you are old hands and know the ropes as I like to call them——’ There was a senseless murmur of semi-laughter. ‘But for those of you who don’t’ — looking at me — ‘I just want to remind you that Norman likes to work in the dark, and any sudden noise or especially light is very dangerous to him. As you know, Norman is a direct voice medium and he does produce what we call ectoplasm. The “etheric voice-box” is another technical term for it. You will see it emerging, and you are not to be alarmed by it. Sometimes the ectoplasm has a tiny weeny bit of a smell, but it’s nothing to worry about. Norman will be joining us in a few moments, so I’d just like to say one last thing. Now some of you lovely people have been asking about making a little contribution towards the work we do. As you know, Norman never accepts payment for what he does, which is a purely spiritual thing, but we do welcome your charitable giving to the cause. And your generous gifts, as you know, will receive in turn a great blessing from the Spiritual Realm. There will be a little basket on the side table in the hall as you leave into which you can place cash or cheques made out to the Society of the Inner Planes. That’s all, thank you, and if you can now take your seats.’