Anthony Powell: Hearing Secret Harmonies

The girls, too, were dressed predominantly in blue. Rusty, whose air was that of a young prostitute, had a thick crop of dark red hair and deep liquid eyes. These were her good points. She was tall, sallow-skinned, hands large and coarse, her collar-bones projecting. Having maintained total silence since arrival, except for intermittent humming, she could be assessed only by looks, which certainly suggested extensive sexual experience.

Fiona, daughter of Isobel’s sister Susan and Roddy Cutts, was a pretty girl (‘Fiona has a touch of glamour,’ her first cousin, Jeremy Warminster, had said), small, fair-skinned, baby-faced, with her father’s sandy hair. Otherwise she more resembled her mother, without the high spirits (an asset throughout her husband’s now closed political career) brought out in Susan by any gathering that showed signs of developing into a party. Susan Cutts’s occasional bouts of melancholy seemed latterly to have descended on her daughter in the form of an innate lugubriousness, which had taken the place of Fiona’s earlier tomboy streak.

The upper halves of both girls were sheathed in T-shirts, inscribed with the single word HARMONY. Rusty wore jeans, Fiona a long skirt that swept the ground. Dragging its flounces across the damp grass, she looked like a mediaeval lady from the rubric of an illuminated Book of Hours, a remote princess engaged in some now obsolete pastime. The appearance seemed to demand the addition of a wimple and pointed cap. This antique air of Fiona’s could have played a part in typecasting Murtlock as a reprobate boy-monk. Equally viewed as whimsical figures in a Tennysonian-type Middle Age, the rôles of Rusty and Henderson were indeterminate; Rusty perhaps a recreant knight’s runaway mistress disguised as a page; Henderson, an unsuccessful troubadour, who had mislaid his lute. This fanciful imagery was not entirely disavowed by the single word motto each girl bore on her breast, a lettered humour that could well have featured in the rubric of a mediaeval manuscript, inscribed on banner or shield of a small figure in the margin. The feet of all four were bare, and — another mediaeval touch — long unwashed.

Fiona (whose birth commemorated her parents’ reconciliation after Roddy Cutts’s misadventure with the cipherine during war service in Persia) had given a fair amount of trouble since her earliest years. This was in contrast with her two elder brothers: Jonathan, married, several children, rising rapidly in a celebrated firm of fine arts auctioneers; Sebastian, still unmarried, much addicted to girlfriends, though no less ambitious than his brother, ‘in computers’. Both the Cutts sons were tireless conversationalists in their father’s manner, uncheckable, informative, sagacious, on the subject of their respective jobs. Fiona, who had run away from several schools (been required to leave at least one), had strengthened her status as a difficult subject by catching typhoid abroad when aged fourteen or fifteen, greatly alarming everyone by her state. Abandonment of boisterous forms of rebellion, in favour of melancholic opposition, dated from the unhappy incident with the electrician, handsome and good-natured, but married and not particularly young. Since then nothing had gone at all well. Fiona’s educational dislodgements had not impaired education sufficiently to prevent her from getting a living on the outskirts of ‘glossy’ journalism.

No one seemed to know where exactly Fiona had run across Scorpio Murtlock, nor the precise nature of this most recent association. It was assumed — anyway by her parents — to include cohabitation. Her uncle, Isobel’s brother, Hugo Tolland, cast doubts on that. Hugo’s opinions on that sort of subject were often less than reliable, a taste for exaggeration marring the accuracy that is always more interesting than fantasy. In this case, Hugo coming down on the side of scepticism — on grounds that, if Murtlock liked sex at all, he preferred his own — the view had to be taken into consideration. How Murtlock lived seemed as unknowable as his sexual proclivities. The Cutts parents, Roddy and Susan, always very ‘good’ about their daughter’s vagaries, continued to be so, accepting the Murtlock regime with accustomed resignation.

The member of the family best equipped to speak with anything like authority of Fiona, and her friends, was Isobel’s unmarried sister, Blanche Tolland, who had, in fact, rung up to ask if we were prepared to harbour a small caravan in our field for one night, its destination unspecified. The easygoing unambitious nature that had caused Blanche, in early days, to be regarded — not wholly without reason — as rather dotty, had latterly given her a certain status in dealing with a generation considerably younger than her own; Blanche’s unemphatic personality providing a diplomatic contact, an agency through which dealings could be negotiated by either side without prejudice or loss of face. This good nature, allied to a deep-seated taste for taking trouble in often uncomfortable circumstances, led to employment in an animal sanctuary, a job that had occupied Blanche for a long time by now.

‘Blanchie meets the animals on their own terms,’ said her sister, Norah, also unmarried. ‘The young people too. She really runs a sanctuary for both.’

‘Do you mean the young people think of Blanchie as an animal, or as another young person?’ asked her brother.

‘Which do you suppose, Hugo?’ said Norah sharply. ‘It’s true they might easily mistake you for an ape.’

Hugo, rather a sad figure after the death of his partner, Sam, could still arouse the mood in Norah that had caused her to observe he would ‘never find a place for himself in the contemporary world’. Working harder than ever in the antique shop, now he was on his own, Hugo’s career could be regarded, in general, as no less contemporary than anyone else’s. Sam (said to have begun life as a seaman) had remained surnameless (like Rusty) to the end, so far as most of the family were concerned. It was during this exchange in Norah’s Battersea flat that I first heard the name of Scorpio Murtlock.

‘Blanchie says Fiona’s turned over a new leaf under the influence of this new young man, Scorp Murtlock. Sober, honest, and an early riser, not to mention meditations. No hint of a drug. It’s a kind of cult. Religious almost. Harmony’s the great thing. They have a special greeting they give one another. I can’t remember the exact words. Quite impressive. They don’t wash much, but then none of the Cutts family ever did much washing.’

‘How did he come to be christened Scorp?’ I asked.

‘Short for Scorpio, his Zodiac sign.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Blanche says attractive, but spooky.’

At this point Hugo showed unexpected knowledge.

‘I didn’t know Fiona’s latest was Scorpio Murtlock. I’ve never met him, but I used to hear about him several years ago, when he was working in the antique business. Two fellow antique dealers told me they had engaged a very charming young assistant.’

Norah was not prepared for Hugo to take over entirely in the Murtlock field.

‘Blanchie says he has a creepy side too.’

‘You can be creepy and attractive. There are different forms of creepiness, just as there are different forms of attractiveness.’

‘The antique dealers are presumably queers?’

‘Even so, that’s hardly the point. Murtlock made himself immensely useful in the business — which ranges from garden furniture to vintage cars — so useful that the owners suddenly found they were being relegated to a back place themselves. Murtlock was slowly but surely elbowing them out.’

‘Did their passion remain unsatisfied?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Unlike you, Hugo, not to be sure about that sort of thing.’