The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [66]
That night in Brescia, Crowley gave me a tarot reading. He said nothing during his first turning of the cards. But when he gathered them into a pack there was something knowing, leering in his smile. And he made a remark about Sappho. He told me Sappho had been as famous in her lifetime for her lust for travel as for the distinction of her verse. He said he’d seen a vision of Sappho in a mantilla and Spanish silk. He asked me had I read an English novelist called D. H. Lawrence. He wondered if I’d ever attended a festival held under a volcano to celebrate the dead. Have you ever drunk mescal, he asked me. It comes in a bottle with a worm. He stuck out his tongue, it lolled mischievously between his morphine-stained teeth. You have to drink mescal all the way down to the worm, he said.
I know Mexico, I told him, which is the place to which he was, of course, referring. I told him I was well-travelled. I told him I was sceptical about Sappho having travelled to what was not in ancient times a part of the known world.
Crowley smiled and spread the cards a second time. We were at a card table on the terrace about twenty feet from the main group of diners. An admirer, a sometimes follower, had lent him the villa. Crowley was dressed flamboyantly, as was his fashion I’d been led to believe, whether performing some occult ritual, or promenading along the Brighton seafront. He flaunted convention out of vanity and exhibitionism, the two traits happily encouraging one another in his character. He was dressed for this evening in a coat and velvet tie reminiscent to me of the pariah playwright, Oscar Wilde. He was old enough to have know Wilde. He was around fifty years old on the evening he read my tarot. But he was addicted to heroin and had the pale and unblemished skin the habit often confers on its victims. He looked younger than he was and far healthier than he could possibly have been.
He knew the secret of my sexual predilection. He knew about Mexico and I saw with some certainty that he knew about Consuelo, too. His hair was unfashionably long and as I studied him he hid one eye behind the veil of it and then shook it back in a gesture that was Consuelo’s to the life. And curiously, I didn’t feel threatened by this. He was collusive in exposing me. My secrets were his, but would go no further than him, I was sure. That was our unspoken understanding. His enthusiasms ran much deeper and darker than mere gossip.
If I give the impression of liking Crowley, it’s because I did. He had a charm and capriciousness the dull Germanic Fischer entirely lacks. Where Crowley had spontaneity, Fischer has only plodding and deliberate calculation. Crowley delights in magic. He cavorts dangerously amid its possibilities. Fischer seeks to use it with the calculated deliberation of an engineer.
Before I left him, I asked him if it was true he had killed those men on the Singalila Ridge during the attempt on Kanchenjunga in ’05. An avalanche killed them, he told me, shuffling and re-shuffling his tarot pack. Does the rumour that you killed them make you angry, I asked him? He said that it didn’t in the slightest. He said he was only annoyed because the avalanche was supposed to have wiped out the expedition at 21,000 feet. In fact, he said, we reached 25,000 feet. We were almost at the summit when fate carried out its chaotic intervention.
He was sitting with his back to the lake over the terrace balustrade and the water was entirely black behind him. A tenor sang an aria from the deck of a yacht or the garden of a villa, perhaps, remote on the opposite shore and the sound carried, perhaps for miles, the voice and accompanying music reaching us with a distorted disembodied clarity