Satan Wants Me Page 6

  Felton said that he had come to the conclusion that Cosmic probably did take baths, but he then caked the dirt on afterwards. Then, having observed that the Lodge did have plans for Cosmic, though not of the same sort as it had for me, Felton started to teach me about the pacing of a glass of claret and precisely how long it took to flare into the full grandeur of its taste. Allegedly, the experience is like listening to music. Then he turned abruptly to questioning me about my research. The intensity of his interrogation was most curious. The wine was forgotten – well not exactly forgotten, but he was drinking it rather than sipping it as he cross-questioned me about my observation of the children in the playground. Although I tried to explain about ritual conceived of as a formal action which is primarily symbolic, he was not interested in any of that sort of ‘bogus academic jargon’. He wanted to know what the playground looked like? How many children were there in it? How old were they? Could I describe some of the individual children? Did I know any of their names? Were they all taken home by their parents? I did my best to answer, but I was and am uneasy. There are two ugly possibilities – but, no, I think some things are best left unwritten. After a while, his interest in the children subsided and, I, not seeing why I should always be on the receiving end, started to cross-question him. I did not get much for my pains.

  I wanted to know if Felton really thought what astrological sign I was born under was significant? Why was it so important for him to read my diaries? What was the Black Book Lodge set up for? What was its Work? Why had Felton stayed with the Lodge and what had he got out of it? What was his relation to the Master? Was it true that Felton was born in Alexandria? What was the Cairo Working? What if anything happened between Felton and Crowley?

  It was no use. Felton was like one of those politicians who, instead of answering the question he has been asked, prefers to answer his own questions.

  The Work is something one only fully comes to understand as one advances on the Path. The truth about the Cairo Working was buried within myself and I should recognise it when I was ready for it. Magical knowledge is like that. It is extremely difficult to say how many people are affiliated to the Lodge, since there were so many different degrees of belonging. Nor could one pin down a firm foundation date for the Lodge, as it evolved out of and gradually broke away from the Ordo Templi Orientis. Felton had continued to visit Crowley after the Lodge’s breakaway, but, in his last years, Crowley’s powers were fading. There always were problems with his sex-magic techniques, but, in the end, ‘the trouble with Crowley is that he went to a minor public school.’

  Really! That is precisely my impression of Felton – that he went to a minor public school. Unlike Granville, for example. Granville is a Harrovian – and he keeps letting you know it. I know that Laura went to one of those experimental private schools where children are encouraged to run wild. Agatha gives the impression that she received a university education, though by now it is overlaid with all sorts of dottiness. As for the Master, he stands outside the British class system. According to Mr Cosmic, the Master was born in Damascus, the son of Christian missionaries, but he was educated in Tibet, at Shamballa, or some such place. Felton, I now learn, got his doctorate in music.

  Perhaps it was the effect of the claret. Suddenly Felton was excited, lit up – like a jelly on fire – if that is possible.

  ‘Music can take a man along the Path. Music is the image and the foreshadowing of the harmony that pervades the world and organises its secret hierarchies. The motions of the spheres in the heavens are in conformity to harmony and proportion, so that, though their passage is made in perfect silence, that passage is musical. The Adept who seeks to make his life a work of art will comport himself in conformity with the harmony that is in all things. Even today’s debased popular ditties, redolent as they are of vaudeville shows and dance halls, speak of higher truths. As Sir Thomas Browne put it, music “is a Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World”.’

  I made a mental note to think of this when I next listened to Martha and the Vandelas.

  A little later, Granville joined us for sorbets and coffee. I had not known that we were expecting Granville. He had walked over from the Opera House, after a performance of Idomeneo. He and Felton started to discuss how my education should be taken in hand, talking about me as if I were not present. I was to attend operas on a regular basis. Also the theatre …

  At length Felton turned back to me,

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon, if it does not get in the way of your researches, Granville will take you to Savile Row and get you fitted for a dinner jacket.’

  ‘I could also take him to Trumpers and get his hair cut,’ volunteered Granville.

  ‘Oh Granville, no! Peter’s hair is beautiful. It makes him look like a cavalier – Rupert of the Rhine perhaps. No, I have always loved long hair on men – so delightfully boho!’

  Granville, intensely apologetic, turned to me. He feared that he might have hurt my feelings. He was accustomed to regard a visit to Trumpers as a treat. Granville’s own hair is not so short. It is thick and curly. Like Cosmic, Granville has a gypsy-ish air about him, but he is an older and cannier gypsy and his movements are smooth and controlled, not Cosmically wild.

  Over coffee we argued over music – opera at first, but then, as the conversation drifted, I was astonished to learn that Granville was a fan of the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead. However, he has no time for British groups, even though some of them patronise his shop. Granville was asking about Sally and why she no longer came to the lectures, when Felton broke in and asked,

  ‘How much have you told Sally about the inner work of the Lodge?’

  ‘Nothing much. But it is not secret, is it?’

  ‘Oh, secrecy is vulgar,’ replied Felton. ‘We are not schoolboys engaged in some surreptitiously illicit activity, such as puffing on the weed behind the cycle shed.’

  ‘Even so, there is such a thing as the discretion which is part of good manners,’ added Granville.

  And with that, the evening broke up. I could not taste the wine properly because of my cold. However, it occurs to me that my cold, unsensational though it seems, might well be an illness of initiation, like Hans Castorp’s TB in The Magic Mountain or those strange fevers that shamans get prior to becoming shamans. Being ill may be a kind of rite de passage into a new life.

  Thursday, May 25

  Am I a latent homosexual? If I am a latent one how would I know? It seems to me that I exist only in my face, mouth and a little bit of the top front part of the skull. The rest of me is a complete mystery to me – a dark continent full of exotic horrors.

  I returned to studying the children in the playground, but now it is as if I have become the eyes of Dr Felton. As if he is using me to watch these children. Why is he so interested in them? I do not think that the children like me very much. Every now and again one of them looks up from its play and scowls at me. For sure, it is my gloomy humour this morning, but there now seems to me to be something sinister in the play of these little urchins. It is not play at all, but a series of secret messages, coded in the gyrations of their arms and legs, and directed at the adult world. Their games are deliberate parodies of what adults do – going out to work, marrying and dying. Above all dying. ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’ These kids have one message, only one message, and that is that I and my generation will die before they do. The dangerous thing about small children is that they are still close to the void from which they have so recently emerged. They remember what it is like not to have existed.

  I left my place on the wall and headed back to my pad. Sally turned up a few minutes later and we headed off to the cinema as arranged, but then we got into an argument. Sally had wanted to see Elvira Madigan, but I am not fond of foreign films and I wanted to see The Devil Rides Out, which was playing at the Electric in Portobello Road. I won the argument. I wish I had not. I grooved on the film, especially Charles Gray being sleek and unctuous as the Sa
tanist Mocata and the scene where Christopher Lee (playing the Duke de Richelieu) faces out the forces of Evil from within the pentacle, but I could feel Sally sitting beside me hating it. Actually it was not so much the film she hated as my attitude to it. I could see she was in a mood and when we got back to my room I put Donovan on the record player. I was hoping to change the vibes, but I did not have much luck there.

  ‘I think that you see yourself as some sort of trainee Duke de Richelieu,’ she said. ‘Or what’s the name of that hero in the comic books you keep reading?’

  ‘Dr Strange.’

  ‘Dr Strange, that’s him. You dream about becoming some high-powered white magician ready to do battle against the forces of evil. Whereas the truth is that, in signing up with the Black Book Lodge, you are aligning yourself with precisely those forces of evil.’

  ‘You have got to listen to yourself Sally. Your voice is all jagged. You are sounding hysterical. The Lodge has nothing to do with forces of evil.’

  ‘They’re everything to do with darkness. Peter, why are you playing with me? They are fucking Satanists. Look at me and tell me that they are not.’

  I pulled her close to me and began to fondle her.

  ‘Come off it Sally. The Black Book Lodge people are nothing like the people in the Dennis Wheatley novels. In the Wheatley books, people like Mocata and Canon Copely actually worship the Devil. The Lodge’s members, on the other hand, simply believe in developing powers that are innate in man. They – we do not worship anything. There is no commitment of belief, either asked for or given.’

  ‘If you do not believe in it, then you can easily give it up.’

  I noticed that her hand was straying up my leg.

  ‘I do not believe in it. I am simply going into it in a spirit of scientific enquiry. I find it interesting from a sociological point of view. One of these days I might even get an article out of it – “Internal Group Dynamics in a North London Lodge of Occultists”, or something along those lines.’

  ‘You are not being straight, Peter, with yourself, or with me. No way have you joined the Lodge in a spirit of sociological enquiry or anything like that. I don’t know what it is, but you are after something hidden, something not for humans, something you will never find. Show me your palm.’

  She was all over me. One of her hands held up my right palm for inspection, while the other was playing over my leg.

  ‘Your palm is changing,’ she said. ‘It is different from when I last looked at it a few months ago. The life-line is threatened.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s possible.’

  Her hand was playing over my groin. Donovan was singing “Three Kingfishers” to a sitar and tabla accompaniment. I was listening with my eyes closed to the music which seemed to suggest the rippling of flesh and the infinite play of possibilities in life.

  ‘Isn’t what we have enough?’ she whispered.

  I said nothing, just nodded. I was entering a fantasy about Krishna playing his flute before the gopini milkmaids.

  ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  She was testing me and it was pleasant to be so tested. It felt like I had a great lump of iron between my legs. I liked to think about surrendering to her desire. But …

  ‘I can’t. There isn’t time. I have got to get ready to go out to the Lodge and be formally robed as a Probationer for Adepthood.’

  There was a hiss of ‘Bastard!’ and she was out of the door so fast that I never even saw her leave. I put Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the record player, sensing that its rich melancholy would be the right accompaniment to my own and I set to writing this all up in the diary.

  I arrived early at the Lodge to have my diary picked over by Felton. He started in on me, even before he had looked at the most recent entries.

  ‘Peter, it occurs to me that you may have been thinking that because I am so old, in your eyes at least, therefore I am not best fitted to give you guidance on the Path. Do not be deceived by appearances, for I am still young. In myself, I am no older than I was on a certain day in 1948. True, I do not appear to be as slim as I once was. Well that, I am afraid, is one of the occupational hazards of becoming a sorcerer – in that respect we resemble wrestlers and opera singers.’

  Then he handed over a wodge of five-pound notes and lowered his eyes to the diary. There were the usual gripes about syntax and punctuation. I was holding my breath, waiting to see how he would react to my description of him and of the tantric kissing, but as usual he only had eyes for errors in punctuation and syntax. What upset him most though was my use elsewhere of the word “prestigious”.

  ‘Yeeugh. I am tempted to give these pages to Boy, if I did not think that they would make him sick. You cannot possibly mean that the restaurants I was talking about were “prestigious” and I could never have said such a thing. “Prestigious” is the adjective derived from prestidigitation (which means conjuring). “Prestigious” therefore means “fraudulent” or “deceitful”. Only the vulgar and ignorant use it in the sense of distinguished or famous. “Prestigious” is part of the threadbare vocabulary of approbation favoured by used-car salesmen, remittance-men and the vendors of snake oil. Such people are lavish with the use of such adjectives as “sumptuous”, “generous” and “discerning”. What was in your head, Peter, when you used this word?’

  Actually I was trying to hold back my laughter. I had deliberately used that word because I guessed that it would wind him up. I was desperately wishing that I had put in more stuff like that and I kept asking him questions about the hyphenation and the semicolon in the hope of delaying the inevitable horror of a second lesson on kissing. To no avail … After a while even he became bored with the semicolon and, rising from his chair, he motioned that I should rise and come to him. But, I made no move towards him. Instead,

  ‘Dr Felton, do you think that I am a homosexual?’

  For only the second time in our acquaintance, I had succeeded in surprising him. He was silent for a while, trying to decide, I guess, how much he could tell me. In the end, he settled for very little.

  ‘How can you be? It is clear from your diary that our last kissing session filled you with revulsion. Besides, for the future purposes of the Lodge it is essential that you be a heterosexual.’

  There was a cruel smile on his face as he beckoned to me once more. Then we closed for a kiss … and another and another. I kept trying to make it OK by telling myself that Felton was just a projection of my mind. This time there was less work on the breathing more stress on the exchange of saliva. Felton was explaining some of the weird magical uses that saliva can be put to. Human saliva is really very like snake venom. They share a lot of the same enzymes. Saliva is one of the most precious substances in the Filthy Dispensary of the Hermetic Temple.

  I thought the session would be over when we finished the kissing lesson, but no. He then turned to my account of Sally in the diary.

  ‘I wonder if you quite realise how she emerges in these pages. As I read in your little book, she is a dim-wit who believes in fairy tales about the return of King Arthur. She is a slut who sleeps around. She is a manipulator who tries to use her body to win you round to what she wants.’

  ‘That’s not true. You do not know her.’

  ‘You are right that I have never met the lady in question. However, it is not I who accuses her, but you do in your diary. You have been telling me that she is not good enough for you.’

  ‘You are telling me to get rid of her?’

  ‘You are telling yourself that.’

  ‘But she’s my girlfriend!’

  ‘The Lodge will find you another.’

  ‘You cannot seriously expect me to give up my girlfriend for two hundred pounds a week! You just can’t buy people like that!’

  I was actually wondering if he would up the offer. And I was wondering if I would be happy to give Sally up for, say, a thousand pounds a week. After all, I could give her some of t
he money – pay her a sort of rent for not being my girlfriend, just like US farmers sometimes get paid by their government not to grow alfalfa.

  But Felton insisted that the money was only for the inspection of my diary. That was our pact. He would not dream of bribing me to give up anyone or anything. That would be pointless, for I had to learn to discipline myself. Unless I renounced Sally, I would be unable to take a single further step along the path. How could I achieve Adepthood, unless I died to my desires? And so on and so on.

  But I was impatient,

  ‘Yes, but why all the mystery? What exactly is the Path? What would I be if I became an Adept? All you ever offer are dark hints. Why not spell out exactly what are the gains and losses of following the path of the sorcerer? What will I gain when I give up Sally?’

  Felton could not suppress a quick thin smile when he heard the words ‘will’ and ‘when’.

  ‘If the reward of the Adept could be put into words, it would not be worth having, would it? All I can tell you is that the person you will become – if you follow the Path – will be a person who will not be able to understand your present self with your humdrum, limited and conventional desires. Still less can your present self understand the man of power you are going to become.’

  I was not really convinced, but it was close to the time for the robing, so I bowed my head and rose to leave. But he called me back.

  ‘Oh yes, Peter. There is one thing. You have misspelt the name of the popular music group on the last page. Procol Harum should be Procul Harum meaning ‘Far from These Things’.

  ‘No. They spell it with an o.’

  Felton groaned. I was humming to myself as I walked out of the door. ‘We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor.’