Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘Russell?’

‘Hi, Nicholas.’

Gwinnett was far less astonished than myself. In fact he did not seem surprised at all. He was carrying under his arm what looked like a large black notebook, equipment that had at first assimilated him with other note-takers in the fields round about.

‘I was told you live near here, Nicholas.’

‘Fairly near.’

‘What’s going on?’

He managed to establish a situation in which I, rather than he, found it necessary to give an explanation for being on that spot at that moment. I tried to summarize briefly for him the problem of the quarry and The Devil’s Fingers. Gwinnett nodded. He made some technically abstruse comment on quarrying. In spite of outward calmness he was not looking at all well. This was very noticeable at close quarters. Gwinnett’s appearance was ghastly, as if he had drunk too much, been up all night, or — on further inspection — slept on the ground in his clothes. The dark suit was covered in dust and scraps of grass. His shoes, too, were caked with mud. He brought with him even greater disquiet than usual; a general sense of insecurity increased by the skies above becoming all at once increasingly dark.

‘Have you been visiting The Devil’s Fingers?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re staying near here?’

‘Not far.’

‘With friends?’

‘No.’

He named an inn at a small town a few miles distant. It appeared from what he said that he was alone there.

‘I didn’t know you were interested in prehistoric stuff — or has this something to do with your Jacobean dramatists?’

Gwinnett, as was often his habit, did not answer at once. He seemed to be examining his own case, either for a clue as to what had indeed happened to him, or, already knowing that, in an effort to decide how much to reveal.

‘I’ve lost my way. Just now I came up the same path, as well as I could remember it. I don’t know how to get down to the road from here.’

‘You’ve been to The Devil’s Fingers before?’

‘We came up on foot last night. I couldn’t sleep when I got back. I thought I’d drive out here again. Make more notes on the spot. It’s because I’m tired I’ve forgotten the path down, I guess.’

‘You’ve got a car with you?’

‘It’s parked in a gully off the road. Beside some old cars that have been dumped there. I took the steep path up the hill. It stops after a while. That’s why I can’t find the place.’

‘You were here last night?’

‘Some of the night.’

His manner was odd even for Gwinnett. He talked like a man in a dream. It occurred to me that he was recovering from a drug. The suspicion was as likely to be unfounded as earlier ones, in Venice, that he was a homosexual, or a reclaimed drunk.

‘Were you one of the party dancing round The Devil’s Fingers last night?’

Gwinnett laughed aloud at that. He did not often laugh. To do so was the measure of the state he was in. His laughter was the reverse of reassuring.

‘Why? Were they seen? How do you know about that?’

‘They were seen.’

‘I wasn’t one of the dancers. I was there.’

‘What the hell was going on?’

‘The stag-mask dance.’

‘Who was performing?’

‘Scorp Murtlock and his crowd.’

‘Are they at your pub too?’

‘They’re on their own. In a caravan. Those taking part in the rites travelled together. Scorp thought that necessary. I met them near here. We came up to the place together.’

‘Who were the rest of the party?’

‘Ken Widmerpool, two girls — Fiona and Rusty — a boy called Barnabas.’

‘Was Widmerpool in charge?’

‘No, Scorp was in charge. That was what the row was about.’

‘There was a row?’

Gwinnett puckered up his face, as if he was not sure he had spoken correctly. Then he confirmed there had been a row. A bad row, he said. Its details still seemed unclear in his mind.

‘Did Widmerpool dance?’

‘When the rite required that.’

‘Naked?’

‘Some of the time.’

‘Why only some of the time?’

‘Ken was mostly recording.’

‘How do you mean — recording?’

‘Sound and pictures. It was a shame things went wrong. I guess that was bound to happen between those two.’

The flashes of light seen by Ernie Dunch were now explained. Gwinnett seemed to find the operation, in which he had himself been anyway to some extent engaged, less out of the ordinary, less regrettable, than the fact that some untoward incident had marred the proceedings.

‘Russell, what was all this about? Why were you there? Why was Widmerpool there? I can just understand Murtlock and his crew going on in that sort of way — one’s reading about such things every day in the paper — but what on earth were you and Widmerpool playing at?’

Gwinnett’s features took on an expression part obstinate, part bewildered. It was a look he had assumed before, when asked to be more explicit about something he had said or done. No doubt his present state added to this impression of being half stunned, a condition genuinely present; if not the result of a drug, then fatigue allied to enormously heightened nervous tension. Again, seeming to consider how best to justify his own standpoint, he did not answer for a moment or two.

‘Gibson Delavacquerie said you’d seen something of the Widmerpool set-up, the commune, or whatever he runs. He said Murtlock had joined up with it. Murtlock seems to have taken over.’

Delavacquerie’s name appeared for some reason to bring relief to Gwinnett. His manner became a trifle less tense.

‘I like Delavacquerie.’

‘You probably know he’s abroad at the moment.’

‘He told me he was going. I talked to him about seeing Ken Widmerpool again, but I didn’t tell Delavacquerie the whole story. When Ken sent me a letter after the Magnus Donners Prize presentation last year I said I just didn’t have time, which was true. Anyhow I wasn’t that anxious to see him. I thought he’d forget about it this time, though I may have mentioned I was coming over again. I don’t know how he found out I was in London. I hadn’t told anyone here I was coming over. I only was in touch with Gibson after I arrived. Then someone called me up, and said he was speaking for Ken, who had a young friend — and master — whom he wanted me to meet.’

‘Master?’

‘It was Scorp himself telephoning, I guess. I hadn’t met him then. That was how it started. While he was speaking — and I’ve wondered whether Scorp didn’t somehow put the idea in my head — it came to me in a flash that I’d often thought these weirdos linked up with the early seventeenth-century gothicism I was writing about. Here was an opportunity not to throw away. I was right.’

‘It was worth it?’

‘Sure.’

This was much the way Gwinnett had talked of his Trapnel researches.

‘As soon as I went down there, I knew my hunch was right. Ken was altogether different from the man he had been the year before. He was crazy about Scorp, and Scorp’s ideas. It was Scorp’s wish that I should be present at the rites they were planning. A summoning. Scorp thought my being there might even make better vibrations, if I didn’t take part.’

Gwinnett stopped. He passed his hand over a face of light yellowish colour. He looked uncommonly ill.

‘Scorp said these rites can’t be performed with any hope of success, if those taking part are in a normal state of mind and body. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink myself now for thirty-six hours. I didn’t want to miss the chance of a lifetime, to see played out in the flesh all the things I’d been going over and over in my mind for months — like Tourneur’s scene in the charnel house.’