Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [69]
‘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?’
‘Scorp said that – among the ones taking part in the rite – they should have been all with all, each with each, within the sacred circle. I was a short way apart. Not in the circle. Scorp thought that best.’
Gwinnett again put up his hand to his head. He looked as if he might faint. Then he seemed to recover himself. Heavy spots of rain were beginning to fall.
‘Did everyone in the circle achieve sexual relations with everyone else?’
‘If they could.’
‘Were they all up to it?’
‘Only Scorp.’
‘He must be a remarkable young man.’
‘It wasn’t for pleasure. This was an invocation. Scorp was the summoner. He said it would have been far more likely to be successful had it been four times four.’
‘Not Widmerpool?’
‘That was the quarrel.’
‘What was?’
‘It had something to do with the union of opposites. I don’t know enough about the rite to say exactly what happened. Ken was gashed with a knife. That was part of the ritual, but it got out of hand. There was some sort of struggle for power. After a while Scorp and the others managed to revive Ken. By then it was too late to complete the rites. Scorp said the ceremony must be abandoned. It wasn’t easy to get Ken back over the fields, and down the hill. As well as doing the recording – it was all wrecked when he fell – he’d been concentrating the will. He’d been giving it all he had. He wasn’t left with much will to get back to the caravan.