Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘What fun he was, though.’

‘But he was a… a product of persuasion?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh, come on, Athena.’

‘Well, it’s all so devalued now.’ She looked cross. ‘The techniques of projection. Used to be frightfully effective, but since that annoying young man on the television, Derren Somebody-or-other…’

‘Brown?’

‘Derren Brown, yes. Little twerp. Makes a point of insisting that it’s all psychology and suggestion, because it makes him look cleverer and the whole business less metaphysical and out of his control. Deserves a good spanking.’

‘Can I describe something to you?’

‘Why not?’ Athena stretched like a small cat, purple claws extended. ‘I have all the time in the worlds.’

Still unsure where he was going with this, Lol told her about Tim Loste and Sir Edward Elgar and Wychehill.

‘I’m afraid it’s a very, very different situation,’ Athena said.

She’d made some fragrant Earl Grey tea. They drank it out of small china cups. The teapot had a Tarot symbol on it – the Hanged Man, dangling from a tree by one foot.

‘You see, this place is ideal for it,’ Athena said. ‘Old women living for much of the time inside their own heads, inside their distant memories. Hothouse of hopeless fantasies. Frightfully easy to insinuate an image.’

‘And how exactly would you…?’

‘Beyond that…’ Athena lifted both palms ‘… I’m revealing no tradecraft. Except to say that it soon begins to generate its own energy. Now, the village you’re describing seems far from a hothouse. If the dwellings are well separated and the residents have little in common and don’t mix socially… hopeless.’

‘It was only an idea,’ Lol said. ‘I was just-’

‘Being a little helpmate?’ Athena squealed. ‘Robinson, you infuriate me! She is a lowly… parish… priest. In the Church of England – half-baked, miserably unfocused, spiritually stagnant and led by a dithering Welshman who thinks that looking like an Old Testament prophet is half the battle. Now- Sit down, I haven’t finished.’

Athena White stood up, plumped out her cushions and curled up again in the window seat.

‘You’ve intrigued me now. Mentioned Elgar. Now there ’s a man with problems. Repressed, frustrated… trapped, for much of his life, inside petty conventions and constraints. A spirit yearning for a freedom which he was foolish enough to think was only granted to children. Do you know The Wand of Youth – piece he wrote when young himself, about children and fairyland?’

‘Only read about it.’

‘He kept trying to revive it at various times, as if he could rediscover the oneness with nature that he believed he had possessed as a child. Now. If you were to ask me if Edward Elgar could be summoned back to his beloved hills, I would say that it was quite conceivable that much of him never left. In other words-’

Athena’s head came forward, like a tortoise’s from its shell. She seemed quite excited.

‘… A man who indeed might haunt.’

Not what Lol had wanted to hear.

He watched Athena placing both her hands on top of her head, as if to prevent significant thoughts from fluttering away like butterflies.

‘Elgar’s biographers, you see, tend to be terribly highbrow music buffs with too much academic credibility to lose. His esoteric side is usually glossed over.’

‘You’ve read the biographies?’

‘Robinson, I spend at least seven hours a day reading. I’ve also known several people – some of them in this very mausoleum – who met him when young. Not always the most delightful of experiences, I’m afraid: he could be a rather negative presence.’

‘Someone said manic-depressive.’

‘There you go again with your silly psychiatric generalizations. Stop it.’

‘Sorry. What did you mean by his esoteric side?’

Lol was feeling confused. Everybody seemed to have a piece of Elgar, and all of them with jagged edges. He was a kind man, an inconsiderate and self-obsessed man; he was arrogant, he was insecure; he was a no-nonsense, self-made, practical man, and he was a mental case; he was a patriot and he was an artist resentful of the taint of patriotism. He was a staunch Catholic, and yet…

‘He was, like so many prominent figures of his time, drawn to the otherwordly,’ Athena said. ‘“Fond of ghost stories” is what the books usually say. But it was clearly more than that. His intermittent Catholicism was never enough to satisfy his curiosity. What do you know about The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?’

‘Top people’s magical club,’ Lol said. ‘Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats…’

‘They all began there, certainly. Yeats was prominent in it, and Elgar worked with Yeats. But his favourite was Algernon Blackwood. Did the music for Blackwood’s play The Starlight Express, and the music contained elements of The Wand of Youth. About children and the otherworld. Bit of a disaster, but they had fun. Blackwood was a likeable cove. Met him once at my uncle’s house – my Uncle Thomas was a latter-day member of the GD. Left me all his “secret papers”. Which was what started me off, I suppose.’

Athena smiled at the memory. Lol drank what remained of his Earl Grey.

‘But Elgar wasn’t a member of the Golden Dawn, was he?’

‘I think he might well have joined if it hadn’t been for his wife and her top-drawer conservative family. Alice, to whom he owed so much. Fortunately, however, Alice liked Blackwood and Blackwood liked Alice. She wrote in her diary of the “out of the world” conversations Elgar had with Blackwood. Blackwood…’

Athena pursed her lips.

‘I may have read one of his stories once,’ Lol said. ‘When I was a kid. “The Haunted and the Haunters”? Very scary.’

‘No, that was Bulwer-Lytton – ah, there, you see, Elgar liked his stories, too. Was said to have based one of his piano pieces on a novel of Bulwer-Lytton’s. Oh, Robinson, how intriguing… what is happening here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m trying to think…’ Athena pressing fingertips to her temples. ‘Yes… now… Blackwood wrote a strange novel about music, The Human Chord. It’s about a group of people – singers – brought together by a retired clergyman to intone the constituent notes in an archaic, mystical chord that will allow them to sound the secret names of God and thus draw down immense power from the heavens. It’s a mad, romantic book but – as with all Blackwood’s fiction – was drawn from his personal experience, in this case with The Golden Dawn. Now…’

Athena rose and went to one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. When she opened it up, Lol saw that its sagging shelves were bulging with books. Athena knew what she was looking for, however, and brought it back to her window seat.

‘We’re looking at Plato. And, of course, Pythagoras. And probably some forgotten ancient Egyptian before that. We’re looking at a time when music was not “a branch of the arts” but a medium of construction

… the construction of the universe itself. Pythagoras saw an exquisite mathematical harmony in the universe, and the harmony was held together by music. Music was formed upon strict laws… music was the law. Can you comprehend any of this?’

‘I’m trying.’

Lol wondered what time it was, if Jane and Gomer had gone to find Margaret Pole’s niece, if Merrily…

‘Keep going, Athena,’ he said.

‘Oh, I could go on all night and all through tomorrow. But I think what you need to know is that the planets were said to vibrate and respond to one another in a musical sequence – the Music of the Spheres. You’ve heard the term?’

Lol nodded. ‘But I always imagined that as a poetic… metaphor?’