Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘I can see that.’

‘But my manner of talking about Sillers sounds most ungenerous. I would not speak a word against him. He did me, as a poor student, kindnesses on more than one occasion, although he could never reconcile himself to some of my interests.’

‘You mean Sillery did not like you going into the Church?’

Fenneau smiled discreetly.

‘Sillery had no objection to the Church — no objection to any Church — as such. He liked to have friends of all sorts, even clergymen. He did not at all mind my living in an undergraduate underworld, the bas fond of the University. The underworld, too, had its uses for Sillers — witness J. G. Quiggin, who attended that same historic tea-party.’

‘You know Quiggin?’

‘I do not often see JG these days. For a time — after meeting at Sillery’s — we became quite close friends.’

Canon Fenneau made a sound that was not much short of a giggle, then continued.

‘Like Sillers, JG found some of my interests ill advised. Socially unacceptable to Sillers, they were politically decadent to JG. Hopelessly unprogressive. JG wanted everyone he knew to be interested in politics in those days. He was a keen Marxist you may remember. I have never liked politics.’

‘May I ask what are these interests of yours that arouse so much antipathy?’

Fenneau smiled, this time gravely. He did not speak for a moment. His small watery eyes gazed at me. There was a touch of melodrama in the look.

‘Alchemy.’

‘The Philosopher’s Stone? Turning base metal into gold?’

‘I prefer to say more in the sense of turning Man from earthly impurity to heavenly perfection. It is a conception that has always gripped me — naturally in a manner not to run counter to my cloth. Some knowledge of such matters can indeed stand a priest in good stead.’

He spoke the last sentence a little archly. The reason for his name’s familiarity was now revealed. Fenneau’s signature would appear from time to time under reviews of books about Hermetic Philosophy, the Rosicrucians, Witchcraft, works that dealt with what might be called the scholarly end of Magic. His own outward physical characteristics — not in themselves exceptional ones in priests of any creed — were, more than in most ecclesiastics, those to be associated with the practice of occultism; fleshiness of body allied to a misty look in the eye. Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh, hierophants of other mysteries, were both exemplars of that same physical type, in spite of what was no doubt a minor matter, difference of sex. These preoccupations of Fenneau’s would explain the faintly uncomfortable sensations his proximity generated. He seemed to convey, especially when he fixed his stare, that he hoped, without making too much fuss about it, to hypnotize his interlocutor; at the very least to read what was in his mind. That, too, was a trait not unknown among conventional priests of all denominations. Canon Fenneau, clearly not at all conventional, possessed the characteristic in a marked degree.

‘Do you still see Mark Members? *

‘Not for a long time until this evening. We have never entirely lost touch, although Mark — unlike JG — considered me less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels, when we were undergraduates. Years ago I was able to help him. He carelessly wrote somewhere that Goethe mentions Paracelsus in Faust , a slip confusing Paracelsus with Nostradamus. Mark was attacked on that account by a rather unpleasant personage, of whom you will certainly have heard, who called himself Dr Trelawney.’

‘I’ve even met him.’

‘I assisted Mark in rebutting these aggressions by pointing out that Trelawney’s long and abstruse letter on the subject darkened counsel. I added that, even if Paracelsus supposed every substance to be made up of mercury, sulphur, and salt, mercury was only one of the elements. Trelawney recognized the warning.’

‘What was the warning?’

‘Mercury is conceived in alchemy as hermaphroditic. Trelawney was at that time engaged in certain practices to which he did not wish attention to be drawn. He sheered off.’

Fenneau’s features had taken on a menacing expression. Dr Trelawney had evidently found an adversary worthy of crossing swords; perhaps, more appropriately, crossing divining rods. I retailed some of my own Trelawney contacts, beginning with the Doctor and his disciples running past the Stonehurst gate.

‘That too? How very interesting. May I say that you bear out a deeply held conviction of mine as to the repetitive contacts of certain individual souls in the earthly lives of other individual souls.’

Fenneau again fixed his eyes on me. He gave the impression of a scientist who has found a useful specimen, if not a noticeably rare one. His stare was preferably not to be endured for too long. He may have been aware of that himself, because he immediately dropped this disturbing inspection. Perhaps he had settled to his own satisfaction whatever was in his mind. I took the initiative.

‘Nietzsche thought individual experiences were recurrent, though he put it rather differently. But what did you mean by saying “that too”?’

‘I was astonished to hear that as a child you should have known Trelawney.’

‘Only by sight. I did not meet him till years later. It is true that, as a child, he haunted my imagination — at times rather more than I liked. Haunting the imagination was the closest we came to acquaintance at that early period.’

‘Haunters of the imagination have already come close to the imagination’s owner. From that early intimacy would you give any credence to the claim of Scorpio Murtlock that in him — Scorpio — Trelawney has returned in the flesh? Some proclaim that as well as Scorpio himself.’

The question was asked this time very quietly, put forward in this unemphatic manner, I think, deliberately to startle. In fact there can be little doubt that Canon Fenneau had such a motive in view. I took the enquiry as matter-of-factly as possible, while accepting its unexpectedness as an impressive conversational broadside. It would have been bad manners to admit less.

‘You know Murtlock too?’

‘Since he was quite a little boy.’

Fenneau spoke reflectively, almost sentimentally.

‘What was he like as a child?’

‘A beautiful little boy. Quite exceptionally so. And very intelligent. He was called Leslie then.’

Fenneau smiled at the contrast between Murtlock’s nomenclature, past and present.

‘You still see him?’

‘From time to time. I have been seeing something of him recently. That was why I was aware he would be known to you. You may have read about certain antagonisms Scorpio was encountering. I believe a good deal never got into the papers. In consequence of this rumpus there was some talk of a television programme about the cult — one of the series After Strange Gods , in which Lindsay Bagshaw recently made a comeback, but perhaps you don’t watch television — and I was approached as a possible compère. I had to say that I had long been a friend of Scorpio’s, but could not publicly associate myself, even as a commentator, with his system, if it can be so called. Mr Bagshaw himself came to see me. It transpired, in the course of conversation, that Scorpio had visited you in the country.’

‘That was produced as a reference?

‘Mr Bagshaw seemed to think it a good one.’

I did not often see Bagshaw these days, but made a mental note to take the matter up with him, if we ran across each other.

‘Murtiock was one of your flock in his young days?’

That was an effort to set the helm, so far as Fenneau was concerned, in a more professionally clerical direction; not exactly a call to order, so much as a plea for better defined premises for discussion of Murtlock’s goings-on. If I were to be brought in by Bagshaw as a sort of reference for Murtlock’s respectability — on the strength of allowing the caravan to be put up for one night — I had a right to be told more about Murtlock. That he had been a pretty little boy might be a straightforward explanation for extending patronage to him, but, anyway as a clergyman, it seemed up to Fenneau to provide a less sensuous basis for their early association together. After further biographical background was given, enquiries could proceed as to whether Fenneau himself had set Murtlock on the path to become a mage. Fenneau was in no way unwilling to elaborate the picture.