All the Time in the Worlds
Gomer’s kitchen was this cheerful but fading memorial to Minnie, full of bright, shiny, literal objects like BISCUIT tins with biscuits printed on the side in crumbly brown letters. The letters on the bread bin were badly worn; time after time, when Jane looked up she read ‘bread’ as DEAD.
Even Gomer seemed jittery, unsteady. Around six, he agreed to go and monitor the situation at Coleman’s Meadow, and Jane switched on her mobile to check the answering service. Couldn’t put it off any longer. Supposed if it was all too heavy to handle – follow-up calls from Jerry Isles, threats from Mum – she could always pretend she’d left the phone at home.
Didn’t remember the last time she’d felt this low, this useless.
‘ Where the hell are you? ’ Eirion was demanding, on voicemail. ‘We’re getting masses of emails referred from the EMA site. Have you any idea at all what’s going down here? ’
She called him back. She told him she knew exactly what was going down. Told him about Pierce, how she’d played it all wrong, couldn’t restrain herself, ended up shafting Lol.
‘The Meadow,’ Eirion said. ‘What’s happening at the Meadow?’
‘Fenced off.’
Jane told him about the ragged protest, and how terrible she felt that she hadn’t been there supporting them. But she didn’t dare show her stupid, notorious face, and at least it sounded like it was all over for tonight.
‘Over?’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘They got the police in. I’m dead in the water, Irene. I haven’t been to school again. I’m stuffed.’ Disgusted at how she must sound, how waily. ‘I’m probably going to have to leave, as from like now, get a job or something. Grow up, you know?’
He’d been talking; she’d only half-heard.
‘… The Deathroad Society, of Antwerp? Conservers of coffin tracks in the low countries. Particularly pissed off. Their chairman, Ronald Verheyen-’
‘All right.’ Jane sat down. ‘I’m sorry. What are you on about?’
Eirion laid it out for her. If Alfred Watkins wasn’t much honoured in his home town, it looked like there were thousands of people all over the world to whom he was some kind of minor deity, and earth-mysteries geeks and landscape anoraks from the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, wherever, were now blasting Herefordshire Council with electronic hate-mail. Far as Eirion could make out, just about every department in the authority – planning, health, chief executive’s, trading standards – they’d all been getting it.
‘It’s somehow got tied into the whole international Green politics thing. These guys are picking up email addresses wherever they can find them. Apparently, individual councillors have even been targeted at home.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because the EMA have had an approach from the council’s lawyers. Jesus, Jane, if the council hated you before…’
‘Irene…’ Jane swallowed. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
She felt hot and swollen all over, like she’d invaded a wasps’ nest and been multi-stung. Gomer’s phone started ringing just as he came in and he hooked it from the wall by the fridge.
‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire yere.’
‘The EMA guy says if it gets too hot he’ll have to pull the story,’ Eirion was saying. ‘I mean, they haven’t got any lawyers or any money, not to speak of. But it’s too late, anyway, now it’s been picked up by the general media. You watching Midlands Today?’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Well, I can’t see it either, in Wales, but I gather-’
‘I don’t care! Oh shit, Irene. This explains Pierce. What do I do ?’
‘Just keep your head down, I suppose. I’d come over and try and take your mind off it, but it’s Gwennan’s birthday, and Dad’s got this surprise party, where we all have to pretend nobody speaks English.’
‘Her’s on the mobile right now, boy,’ Gomer said into the phone. ‘I get her to call you back?’
Jane said, ‘I’ll call you back, Irene.’
Clicked him off and went over to secondary-smoke Gomer’s ciggy.
‘All right,’ Gomer said. ‘Will do, boy.’ Handed the phone to Jane. ‘Lol.’
‘Look, what Pierce said before- I didn’t-’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Lol said, ‘I’m over that. It doesn’t get to me any more. Can you write something down?’
The very fact that he knew instantly what she was talking about showed he was far from over it. Jane made scribbling motions to Gomer and he brought her a pen and a receipt book with Gomer Parry Plant Hire billheads. Lol said that if she and Gomer wanted to get out of the village for a while there was a woman they could check out. It might be something or nothing, Lol said. She needed to be polite. Thanks.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m still at The Glades.’
‘I’m bad news today, Lol. Nothing works out for me. Can’t you do it?’
‘No, I’m… I think I’m getting into something else,’ Lol said.
His voice sounding disconnected, like he was with someone, or his mind was already working on the something else.
‘Sholto.’ Lol folded up his mobile. ‘I think that was his name.’
‘Frightfully good-looking. Essence of Ronald Colman.’ Athena was gazing wistfully into a corner of the room. ‘So few of us remember Ronald Colman any more, even here.’
‘I bet they all remember Sholto, though,’ Lol said.
‘We needed him, Robinson. As I think I told your paramour at the time, who among the living could we attract any more?’
The alleged haunting of The Glades, as described by Merrily, had involved a languid shadow on the landing, blown bulbs. Hadn’t there been a smell of cigarette smoke, the flicking of a lighter?
‘The point being,’ Lol said, ‘that Sholto had no history at The Glades. He was just a face from an old photo album. Someone whose image you’d somehow contrived to… appropriate. And insinuate into people’s consciousness.’
‘What fun he was, though.’
‘But he was a… a product of persuasion?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Oh, come on, Athena.’
‘Well, it’s all so devalued now.’ She looked cross. ‘The techniques of projection. Used to be frightfully effective, but since that annoying young man on the television, Derren Somebody-or-other…’
‘Brown?’
‘Derren Brown, yes. Little twerp. Makes a point of insisting that it’s all psychology and suggestion, because it makes him look cleverer and the whole business less metaphysical and out of his control. Deserves a good spanking.’
‘Can I describe something to you?’
‘Why not?’ Athena stretched like a small cat, purple claws extended. ‘I have all the time in the worlds.’
Still unsure where he was going with this, Lol told her about Tim Loste and Sir Edward Elgar and Wychehill.
‘I’m afraid it’s a very, very different situation,’ Athena said.
She’d made some fragrant Earl Grey tea. They drank it out of small china cups. The teapot had a Tarot symbol on it – the Hanged Man, dangling from a tree by one foot.
‘You see, this place is ideal for it,’ Athena said. ‘Old women living for much of the time inside their own heads, inside their distant memories. Hothouse of hopeless fantasies. Frightfully easy to insinuate an image.’
‘And how exactly would you…?’
‘Beyond that…’ Athena lifted both palms ‘… I’m revealing no tradecraft. Except to say that it soon begins to generate its own energy. Now, the village you’re describing seems far from a hothouse. If the dwellings are well separated and the residents have little in common and don’t mix socially… hopeless.’
‘It was only an idea,’ Lol said. ‘I was just-’
‘Being a little helpmate?’ Athena squealed. ‘Robinson, you infuriate me! She is a lowly… parish… priest. In the Church of England – half-baked, miserably unfocused, spiritually stagnant and led by a dithering Welshman who thinks that looking like an Old Testament prophet is half the battle. Now- Sit down, I haven’t finished.’
Athena White stood up, plumped out her cushions and curled up again in the window seat.
‘You’ve intrigued me now. Mentioned Elgar. Now there ’s a man with problems. Repressed, frustrated… trapped, for much of his life, inside petty conventions and constraints. A spirit yearning for a freedom which he was foolish enough to think was only granted to children. Do you know The Wand of Youth – piece he wrote when young himself, about children and fairyland?’
‘Only read about it.’
‘He kept trying to revive it at various times, as if he could rediscover the oneness with nature that he believed he had possessed as a child. Now. If you were to ask me if Edward Elgar could be summoned back to his beloved hills, I would say that it was quite conceivable that much of him never left. In other words-’
Athena’s head came forward, like a tortoise’s from its shell. She seemed quite excited.
‘… A man who indeed might haunt.’
Not what Lol had wanted to hear.
He watched Athena placing both her hands on top of her head, as if to prevent significant thoughts from fluttering away like butterflies.
‘Elgar’s biographers, you see, tend to be terribly highbrow music buffs with too much academic credibility to lose. His esoteric side is usually glossed over.’
‘You’ve read the biographies?’
‘Robinson, I spend at least seven hours a day reading. I’ve also known several people – some of them in this very mausoleum – who met him when young. Not always the most delightful of experiences, I’m afraid: he could be a rather negative presence.’
‘Someone said manic-depressive.’
‘There you go again with your silly psychiatric generalizations. Stop it.’
‘Sorry. What did you mean by his esoteric side?’
Lol was feeling confused. Everybody seemed to have a piece of Elgar, and all of them with jagged edges. He was a kind man, an inconsiderate and self-obsessed man; he was arrogant, he was insecure; he was a no-nonsense, self-made, practical man, and he was a mental case; he was a patriot and he was an artist resentful of the taint of patriotism. He was a staunch Catholic, and yet…
‘He was, like so many prominent figures of his time, drawn to the otherwordly,’ Athena said. ‘“Fond of ghost stories” is what the books usually say. But it was clearly more than that. His intermittent Catholicism was never enough to satisfy his curiosity. What do you know about The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?’
‘Top people’s magical club,’ Lol said. ‘Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats…’
‘They all began there, certainly. Yeats was prominent in it, and Elgar worked with Yeats. But his favourite was Algernon Blackwood. Did the music for Blackwood’s play The Starlight Express, and the music contained elements of The Wand of Youth. About children and the otherworld. Bit of a disaster, but they had fun. Blackwood was a likeable cove. Met him once at my uncle’s house – my Uncle Thomas was a latter-day member of the GD. Left me all his “secret papers”. Which was what started me off, I suppose.’
Athena smiled at the memory. Lol drank what remained of his Earl Grey.
‘But Elgar wasn’t a member of the Golden Dawn, was he?’
‘I think he might well have joined if it hadn’t been for his wife and her top-drawer conservative family. Alice, to whom he owed so much. Fortunately, however, Alice liked Blackwood and Blackwood liked Alice. She wrote in her diary of the “out of the world” conversations Elgar had with Blackwood. Blackwood…’
Athena pursed her lips.
‘I may have read one of his stories once,’ Lol said. ‘When I was a kid. “The Haunted and the Haunters”? Very scary.’
‘No, that was Bulwer-Lytton – ah, there, you see, Elgar liked his stories, too. Was said to have based one of his piano pieces on a novel of Bulwer-Lytton’s. Oh, Robinson, how intriguing… what is happening here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m trying to think…’ Athena pressing fingertips to her temples. ‘Yes… now… Blackwood wrote a strange novel about music, The Human Chord. It’s about a group of people – singers – brought together by a retired clergyman to intone the constituent notes in an archaic, mystical chord that will allow them to sound the secret names of God and thus draw down immense power from the heavens. It’s a mad, romantic book but – as with all Blackwood’s fiction – was drawn from his personal experience, in this case with The Golden Dawn. Now…’
Athena rose and went to one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. When she opened it up, Lol saw that its sagging shelves were bulging with books. Athena knew what she was looking for, however, and brought it back to her window seat.
‘We’re looking at Plato. And, of course, Pythagoras. And probably some forgotten ancient Egyptian before that. We’re looking at a time when music was not “a branch of the arts” but a medium of construction
… the construction of the universe itself. Pythagoras saw an exquisite mathematical harmony in the universe, and the harmony was held together by music. Music was formed upon strict laws… music was the law. Can you comprehend any of this?’
‘I’m trying.’
Lol wondered what time it was, if Jane and Gomer had gone to find Margaret Pole’s niece, if Merrily…
‘Keep going, Athena,’ he said.
‘Oh, I could go on all night and all through tomorrow. But I think what you need to know is that the planets were said to vibrate and respond to one another in a musical sequence – the Music of the Spheres. You’ve heard the term?’
Lol nodded. ‘But I always imagined that as a poetic… metaphor?’
‘It is a metaphor, like all these images, for an internal process. As above, so below. A connection between our inner selves and God, forged through the power of music. This was studied in some depth by The Golden Dawn, and Blackwood used some of what he’d learned there in The Human Chord – Blackwood being a writer first and foremost, rather than a true seeker after cosmic consciousness. A romantic, if you like.’
‘Like Elgar.’
‘Absolutely like Elgar. And for Blackwood not to have seized the opportunity to discuss what he’d learned about the origins of music with the most famous composer in the land is… well, so unlikely as to be not worth consideration.’
Lol said, ‘The play – musical, whatever – that Elgar and Blackwood worked on. You said it was called The Starlight Express? The house where Winnie Sparke – Tim Loste’s mentor – lives, at Wychehill, is called Starlight Cottage.’
Athena White squeaked in delight.
‘Starlight, as it happens, was Elgar’s nickname for Blackwood! They used nicknames as a kind of code.’
‘There’s a letter,’ Lol said, ‘in the Wychehill parish records from someone signing himself Starlight… suggesting Wychehill as a highly suitable place for a church because no area of southern Britain was more conducive to the… to the creation and performance of the most spiritually exalted music… does that make any-?’
‘Sounds like something Blackwood would write, and if he signed himself Starlight he could only have been addressing Elgar.’
‘The letter’s to “Sirius”.’
‘The dog star?’ Athena’s eyes glittered. ‘Yes! Elgar was frightfully fond of dogs. That would make absolute sense. Oh, Robinson, I wonder… I wonder…’
Athena began leafing through the book she’d brought from the cupboard, a fairly slim hardback with a plain green cover, called City of Revelation.
‘I think where this brings us,’ she said softly, ‘is to the Whiteleafed Oak.’