Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [71]
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.’
‘What were they trying to do?’
‘The idea was to summon up a dead man called Trelawney.’
‘How far did they get?’
Gwinnett gave a slight shudder. He was detached, yet far from calm, perhaps no more than his normal state, now aggravated by near collapse.
‘They got no further than the fight between Ken and Scorp.’
Gwinnett’s use of these abbreviated first-names gave a certain additional grotesqueness to what was already a sufficiently grotesque narrative.
‘Did they have a scrap during the rite?’
‘In the middle of it.’
‘The horned dance?’
‘No – during the sexual invocations that followed.’
‘What did those consist of?