Susan Howatch - Mystical Paths

‘And Perry came down specially from London. Tell me, who else is going to this party of his tonight?’

‘Oh, various people I know.’

‘Girls?’

‘You bet.’

‘Thank God!’ said Martin. ‘For one ghastly moment I thought I’d have to come to Albany to chaperone you, and all I want to do after that rehearsal is put my feet up and watch the box.’

‘Are you trying to tell me –’

‘Perry moves in certain circles, yes. God, what a relief it is to live like a monk! I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but when one gets to the advanced age of fifty-eight, the thought of performing in bed as well as on the stage is simply too exhausting to contemplate, and now I find I’m hopelessly hooked on the delights of living alone.’ He laughed before adding: ‘Getting like Dad, aren’t I? No wonder he’s decided I’m a fit person to keep an eye on you when you come trundling up to London! I’ve even started to go to church. They do a first-class show at St Mary’s Bourne Street – brilliant stagecraft enhanced by the English lust for ceremonial! I’m wild about the whole gorgeous circus.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That type of Anglo-Catholic ritualism has always appealed to people like you.’ I stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Well, watch yourself with Perry Palmer,’ said Martin smoothly as the conversation degenerated into a verbal punch-up. ‘Psychics are usually attractive to both sexes. I bet Dad’s had plenty of men in love with him in his time.’

‘The most irritating thing about homosexuals,’ I said, heading for the door, ‘is that they believe everyone’s secretly homosexual. A true triumph of hope over statistics.’

‘That’s a great exit line!’ cried Martin, genuinely amused, but I walked out without looking back.

I took the tube to Green Park and wandered down Piccadilly to Albany, that fabulous ex-palace where the waiting-list is about twenty years long and no one gets a ‘set’ of rooms unless they have a personal hotline to a bunch of nobs who appear to be less well-known than the Queen but more influential. How Perry had acquired this flat of his I had no idea. His grandmother was supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress, but a lot of women were supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress and presumably not all their grandsons had ended up in Albany. Anyway, there Perry lived in a ground-floor set that faced the Rope Walk, and there was I in the September of 1963 padding past the uniformed flunkey in the grand entrance hall.

Perry was a spy. Now that I had been informed that he was also a homosexual I thought: how typical! Apparently the Foreign Office had learnt nothing from the Burgess and Maclean affair. Then I remembered that it was only rumoured he was a spy; all that was known for certain was that he spoke fluent Russian and held some Foreign Office post which he refused to discuss. Possibly he just translated incoming mail from the Kremlin.

I had been bothered by Martin’s revelations about Perry, but during my journey to Albany I became less bothered and more sceptical. Martin had denied knowing Perry well. It seemed obvious in retrospect that he’d rushed to judgement after seeing Perry carousing with a certain bunch of actors, but just because Perry dabbled in the social side of the acting profession in order to give himself a break from the tight-lipped job at the FO I didn’t have to conclude he had a sex-life, lawful or unlawful. In fact Marina always said Perry was a eunuch. Perhaps he was just undersexed. Certainly I couldn’t see Christian being close friends with an active homosexual. That didn’t add up.

I rang the bell and seconds later Perry was flinging open the door. ‘Nick!’ he exclaimed, very crisp in a grey suit, white shirt and old Wykehamist tie. ‘Welcome to my orgy!’

I smiled at him warily and prowled across the threshold.

There were far more people present than at Marina’s Starbridge party in May. The large drawing-room was filled with cigarette-smoke and screeching voices and raucous laughter and overdressed bodies and (from the record-player) the muffled blaring of a big band, very ’forties, very square. Funny how the vast majority of the human race has to generate a repulsive amount of noise before it can convince itself it’s having a good time.

Some sort of sea-green cocktail was circulating but I didn’t like the look of it so I asked for a Coke. No luck. I settled for a glass of Rose’s lime juice which Perry produced for me from his kitchen. The trouble with alcohol is that it tastes so disgusting, and if you start mixing lime juice with, for example, gin, the result always seems to me to be an affront to the taste-buds. Someone offered me a cigarette but I waved it away. I’ve never been able to see the point of smoking. It smells vile and all that ash makes such a mess. If you’ve got to do something with your mouth and hands between meals, why not sip Coke and chew gum? American civilisation could be pretty weird – all those obese cars – but some of the basic innovations, such as Coke and gum, were genuinely useful … Or so it seemed to me at the age of twenty.

Marina pounced on me within seconds. (‘Nicky darling, heavenly to see you!’) She was wearing a silvery cylinder squashed in the right places to show off her Venus de Milo figure. Her friends Emma-Louise and Holly also pounced. (‘Nicky – super ? one shrieked, and: ‘We’ve won our bet that you’d be wearing jeans – even to an orgy at Albany!’ screamed the other.) But there was no sign of my friend Venetia. I was told she was too busy preparing for her wedding. I was just sighing with regret when Dinkie undulated by, entwined with Michael, and gave me a wink as she passed. This enthralled me. I spent some time wondering whether I should have winked back, but I wouldn’t have wanted to offend Michael. Finally Perry ended my reverie by musing to me: ‘Christian and Katie are late – stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, I suppose,’ and I heard myself utter the non sequitur : ‘You never mentioned that you knew my brother Martin.’

‘Something told me,’ said Perry, ‘that you got very, very tired of people droning on about your brother,’ and suddenly I decided to like him.

I said: ‘Do you go to the theatre a lot?’

‘All the time, yes, I’m an addict. Look, come and meet some of my thespian friends …’

I met his thespian friends of both sexes. Perry never mentioned my connection with Martin, but Katie’s brother Simon, a pea-brained product of Eton, eventually let the cat out of the bag and then all the thespians started to gush over me with the result that the party became tedious. I took refuge in the lavatory. Venturing out at last with reluctance I found myself overpowered by the desire for more lime juice but before retiring to the kitchen to find the bottle I moseyed around, putting my nose in the dining-room where a buffet was laid out, casting an eye on Perry’s bedroom where a single bed added weight to the theory that he was undersexed, and taking a peek at the adjoining bathroom where I found a peculiar Picasso-style drawing of a mermaid.

Having noted the complete absence of any item which would have indicated homosexual leanings, I beetled down some stairs into the basement kitchen and came to a halt, mouth gaping and eyes wide, at the splendid sight which confronted me. The kitchen was a historical masterpiece, untouched by the mid-twentieth-century mania for making kitchens look like poor relations of the morgue. I saw a large wooden table, very handsome, a gas stove which could only have been pre-war, and a distinguished porcelain sink. The old range had been left in place for its ornamental value, and beside it there was even a set of brass fire-irons: poker, tongs, shovel and soot-brush. Amazing! Anyone who lived in 1963 and kept fire-irons in his kitchen had to be exceptional, and I saw clearly then that Perry was no run-of-the-mill theatrical hanger-on with homosexual leanings but a highly original celibate who spoke Russian, lived in a palace, devoted his free time to civilised cultural pursuits – and kept Rose’s lime juice in some corner I now had to find.