The military philosophers (16 page)

‘Not me,’ said Pamela. ‘You’ll have to go elsewhere if you want to be kept.’

Mrs Erdleigh was, indeed, looking out into the street through the glass doors at the other end of the hall. Her age as indeterminate as ever from her outward appearance, she was smiling slightly to herself. This was the first time I had seen her since living in the flats. A helmet was set very squarely on her head and she wore a long coat or robe, a pushteen or similar garment, woolly inside, skin without, the exterior ornamented with scrolls and patterns of Oriental design in bright colours. She was carrying a small black box under one arm. Now she set this on the ground and removed the helmet, revealing a coiffure of grey-blue curls that had been pressed down by the weight of the tin hat. These she ruffled with her fingers. Then she took the helmet between her hands, and, as if in deep thought, raised it like a basin or sacrificial vessel, a piece of temple equipment for sacred rites. Her quiet smile suggested she was rather enjoying the raid than otherwise. Nothing much seemed to be happening outside, though the row continued unabated.

‘She was mixed up with an uncle of mine – in fact he left her his money, such as it was.’

The bequest had caused great annoyance in the family, almost as much on account of Uncle Giles turning out to own a few thousands, as because of the alienation of the capital sum.

‘Must have made it quite lately as the result of some very risky speculation,’ my father had said at the time. ‘Never thought Giles had a penny to bless himself with.’

‘Let’s go over and talk to her,’ said Stevens. ‘She’s good value.’

He had that taste, peculiar to certain egotists, to collect together close round him everyone he might happen to know in any given area.

‘Oh, God,’ said Pamela. ‘Need we? I suppose she flattered you.’

‘Go on, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Ask Mrs Erdleigh to join us, if you know her as well.’

I agreed to do this, more from liking the idea of meeting Mrs Erdleigh again than to please Stevens. As I approached, she herself turned towards me.

‘I wondered when you would speak,’ she said gently.

‘You’d already seen me in the hall?’

‘Often in this building. But we must not anticipate our destinies. The meeting had to wait until tonight.’

From the way she spoke, it was to be assumed that she was so far above material contacts that the impetus of our reunion must necessarily come from myself. The magical course of events would no doubt have been damaged had she taken the initiative and addressed me first.

‘What a night.’

‘I could not sleep,’ she said, as if that were a matter for surprise. ‘The omens have not been good for some days past, though in general better than for many months. I can see at once from your face that you are well situated. The Centaur is friend to strangers and exiles. His arrow defends them.’

‘Come and talk to us. There’s a young man called Odo Stevens, who has done rather well as a soldier – been very brave, I mean – and a girl called Pamela Flitton. He says he knows you already.’

‘I met your young army friend on the roof when I was engaged in certain required exsufflations. He is under Aries, like your poor uncle, but this young man has the Ram in far, far better aspect, the powerful rays of Mars favouring him rather than the reverse, as they might some –  your uncle, for example.’

I told her I had seen the Ufford – where we had first met – now in such changed circumstances. She was not at all interested, continuing to speak of Stevens, who had evidently made an impression on her.

‘It is the planet Mars that connects him with that very beautiful young woman,’ she said. ‘The girl herself is under Scorpio – like that unhappy Miss Wartstone, so persecuted by Saturn – and possesses many of the scorpion’s cruellest traits. He told me much about her when we talked on the roof. I fear she loves disaster and death – but he will escape her, although not without an appetite for death himself.’

Mrs Erdleigh smiled again, as if she appreciated, even to some extent approved, this taste for death in both of them.

‘Lead me to your friends,’ she said. ‘I am particularly interested in the girl, whom I have not yet met.’

She picked up the black box, which presumably contained spells and jewellery, carrying the helmet in her other band. We returned to Stevens and Pamela. They were having words about a bar of chocolate, produced from somewhere and alleged to have been unfairly divided. Stevens jumped up and seized Mrs Erdleigh by the hand. It looked as if he were going to kiss her, but he stopped short of that. Pamela put on the helmet that had been lying beside her on the seat. This was evidently a conscious gesture of hostility.

‘This is Miss Flitton,’ said Stevens.

Pamela made one of her characteristically discouraging acknowledgments of this introduction. I was curious to see whether Mrs Erdleigh would exercise over her the same calming influence she had once exerted on Mona, Peter Templer’s first wife, when they had met. Mona, certainly a far less formidable personality than Pamela, had been in a thoroughly bad mood that day – without the excuse of an air-raid being in progress – yet she had been almost immediately tranquillized by Mrs Erdleigh’s restorative mixture of flattery, firmness and occultism. For all one knew, air-raids might positively increase Mrs Erdleigh’s powers. She took Pamela’s hand. Pamela withdrew it at once.

‘I’m going to have a walk outside,’ she said. ‘See what’s happening.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Stevens. ‘You’re not allowed to wander about during raids, especially one like this.’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Erdleigh, ‘I well discern in your heart that need for bitter things that knows no assuagement, those yearnings for secrecy and tears that pursue without end, wherever you seek to fly them. No harm will come to you, even on this demonic night, that I can tell you. Nevertheless stay for a minute and talk with me. Death, it is true, surrounds your nativity, even though you yourself are not personally threatened – none of us is tonight. There are things I would like to ask you. The dark unfathomable lake over which you glide – you are under a watery sign and yet a fixed one – is sometimes dull and stagnant, sometimes, as now, angry and disturbed.’

Pamela was certainly taken aback by this confident approach, so practised, so self-assured, the tone at once sinister and adulatory, but she did not immediately capitulate, as Mona had done. Instead, she temporized.

‘How do you know about me?’ she asked. ‘Know when I was born, I mean.’

She spoke in a voice of great discontent and truculence. Mrs Erdleigh indicated that Stevens had been her informant. Pamela looked more furious than ever.

‘What does he know about me?’

‘What do most people know about any of their fellows?’ said Mrs Erdleigh quietly. ‘Little enough. Only those know, who are aware what is to be revealed. He may have betrayed the day of your birth. I do not remember. The rest I can tell from your beautiful face, my dear. You will not mind if I say that your eyes have something in them of the divine serpent that tempted Eve herself.’

It was impossible not to admire the method of attack. Stevens spoiled its delicacy by blundering in.

‘Tell Pam’s fortune,’ he said. ‘She’d love it – and you were wonderful with me.’

‘Why should I want my fortune told? Haven’t I just said I’m going to have a look round outside?’

‘Wiser not, my dear,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘As I said before, my calculations tell me that we are perfectly safe if we remain here, but one cannot always foresee what may happen to those who ride in the face of destiny. Why not let me look at your hand? It will pass the time.’

‘If you really want to. I don’t expect it’s very interesting.’

I think Mrs Erdleigh was not used to being treated in such an ungracious manner. She did not show this in the smallest degree, but what she went on to say later could be attributed to a well controlled sense of pique. Perhaps that was why she insisted that Pamela’s hand should be read by her.

‘No human life is uninteresting.’

‘Have a look then – but there’s not much light here.*

‘I have my torch.’

Pamela held out her palm. She was perhaps, in fact, more satisfied than the reverse at finding opposition to her objections overruled. It was likely she would derive at least some gratification in the anodyne process. However farouche, she could scarcely be so entirely different from the rest of the world. On the other hand, some instinct may have warned her against Mrs Erdleigh, capable of operating at as disturbing a level as herself. Mrs Erdleigh examined the lines.

‘I would prefer the cards,’ she said. ‘I have them with me in my box, of course, but this place is really too inconvenient … As I guessed, the Mount of Venus highly developed … and her Girdle … You must be careful, my dear … There are things here that surprise even me …
les tentations lubriques sont bien prononcées
… You have found plenty of people to love you … but no marriage at present … no… but perhaps in about a year…’

‘Who’s it going to be?’ asked Stevens. ‘What sort of chap?’

‘Mind your own business,’ said Pamela.

‘Perhaps it is my business.’

‘Why should it be?’

‘A man a little older than yourself,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘A man in a good position.’

‘Pamela’s mad about the aged,’ said Stevens. ‘The balder the better.’

‘I see this man as a jealous husband,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘This older man I spoke of … but … as I said before, my dear, you must take good care … You are not always well governed in yourself … your palm makes me think of that passage in Desbarrolles, the terrible words of which always haunt my mind when I see their marks in a hand shown to me …
la débauche, l’effronterie, la licence, le dévergondage, la coquetterie, la vanité, l’esprit léger, l’inconstance, la paresse
… those are some of the things in your nature you must guard against, my dear.’

Whether or not this catalogue of human frailties was produced mainly in revenge for Pamela’s earlier petulance was hard to know. Perhaps not at all. Mrs Erdleigh was probably speaking no more than the truth, voicing an analysis that did not require much occult skill to arrive at. In any case, she never minded what she said to anyone. Whatever her intention, the words had an immediate effect on Pamela herself, who snatched her hand away with a burst of furious laughter. It was the first time I had heard her laugh.

‘That’s enough to get on with,’ she said. ‘Now I’m going for my walk.’

She made a move towards the door. Stevens caught her arm.

‘I say you’re not going.’

She pulled herself away. There was an instant’s pause while they faced each other. Then she brought up her arm and gave him a backhand slap in the face, quite a hard one, using the knuckles.

‘You don’t think I’m going to take orders from a heel like you, do you?’ she said. ‘You’re pathetic as a lover. No good at all. You ought to see a doctor.’

She walked quickly through the glass door of the entrance hall, and, making the concession of putting on her helmet once more, disappeared into the street. Stevens, knocked out for a second or two by the strength of the blow, made no effort to follow. He rubbed his face, but did not seem particularly surprised nor put out by this violence of treatment. Probably he was used to assaults from Pamela. Possibly such incidents were even fairly normal in his relationships with women. There was, indeed, some slight parallel to the moment when Priscilla had suddenly left him in the Cafe Royal, though events of that night, in some manner telepathically connecting those concerned, had been enough to upset the nerves of everyone present. We might be in the middle of a raid that never seemed to end, but at least personal contacts were less uncomfortable than on the earlier occasion. Mrs Erdleigh, too, accepted with remarkable composure the scene that had just taken place.

‘Little bitch,’ said Stevens. ‘Not the first time she has done that. Nothing I like less than being socked on the jaw. I thought she’d like to have her fortune told.’

He rubbed his face. Mrs Erdleigh smiled one of her slow, sweet, mysterious smiles.

‘You do not understand enough her type’s love of secrecy, her own unwillingness to give herself.’

‘I understand her unwillingness to give herself,’ said Stevens. ‘I’ve got hold of that one OK. In fact I’m quite an expert on the subject.’

‘To allow me to look longer at her palm would have been to betray too much,’ said Mrs Erdleigh. ‘I offered to make a reading only because you pressed me. I was not surprised by this result. All the same, you are right not to be unduly disturbed by her behaviour. In that way you show your own candour and courage. She will come to no harm. In any case, I do not see the two of you much longer together.’

‘Neither do I, if there are many more of these straight lefts.’

‘Besides, you are going overseas.’

‘Soon?’

‘Very soon.’

‘Shall I see things through?’

‘There will be danger, but you will survive.’

‘What about her. Will she start up with any more Royalties? Perhaps a king this time.’

He said this so seriously that I laughed. Mrs Erdleigh, on the other hand, accepted the question gravely.

‘I saw a crown not far away,’ she said. ‘Her fate lies along a strange road but not a royal one – whatever incident the crown revealed was very brief – but still it is the road of power.’

She picked up her black box again.

‘You’re going back to your room?’

‘As I said before, no danger threatens tonight, but I thoughtlessly allowed myself to run out of a little remedy I have long used against sleeplessness.’

She held out her hand. I took it. Mention of ‘little remedies’ called to mind Dr Trelawney. I asked if she ever saw him. She made a mysterious sign with her hand.

‘He passed over not long after your uncle. Being well instructed in such enlightenments, he knew his own time was appointed – in war conditions some of his innermost needs had become hard to satisfy – so he was ready. Quite ready.’

‘Where did he die?’

‘There is no death in Nature’ – she looked at me with her great misty eyes and I remembered Dr Trelawney himself using much the same words – ‘only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. He has re-entered the Vortex of Becoming.’