TWENTY-EIGHT
I HAVE BEEN WITNESS, this century, to the murder of Christian decency. It was surprising how quickly rats began to bother Mrs Cornelius after the Convent of the Poor Clares was pulled down across from her flat. They were attracted first to the rubble and then they sniffed the south side of the street and found her. She had never minded a few, she said, but this was a bloody plague. We both mourned the passing of the Convent. It had been a bastion of Christian wholesomeness in surroundings of pagan squalor. Its brick was mellowed by more rural days, when the meadow ran to the brook not always downwind of the tanneries. Some Georgian manor had doubtless been levelled to provide the Convent with land and no doubt that, for its contemporaries, was the beginning of the end. It is always the beginning of the end, always the best and the worst. No matter how thoroughly attacked, the city shall always triumph. It is folly, as the Nazis did, to try to resist this fundamental condition.
What are you? he said. Some Peradur? Some Gascon rapiero? Nothing so romantic, I told him. You give me too much credit. What else could I say? It was the same with the Jew in Arcadia. I have always admitted I was grateful. But I was no male Venus, born of the sea, as he described. In a poet these fancies are always discounted, so one does not complain. Gascon rapiero? Nothing so courageous, I said. Nothing so blind. I saw Moorcock, the one they all despise and pretend to be friendly with. He is their favourite journalist and swallows their lies. He was picking about in the ruins of the Convent after the demolition people had broken down the walls and most of the buildings, their frozen bulldozers rearing over fruit trees and vegetable gardens, squatting on lawns where the nuns used to play cricket and have picnics in the summer. It was like the War. The Convent, that sturdy Victorian acknowledgement to the needs of the spirit, was one of the first buildings to rise here, in 1860, and one of the first to fall. They are going to be council flats, she says. We need more council flats, do we, and less solace for the soul? And what else to serve them? Betting shops? Burger bars? Off-licences? I have yet to see a bookshop or a flower shop flourish in the shadow of this authoritarian concrete. For years the wall bore the slogan ‘Vietgrove’ and something about Eichmann. We set our watches by that wall, says the Cornelius boy, doubtless enjoying some self-induced high on Ajax and powdered milk. I warned him. It is why he is getting such a nasal accent. People will take him for an American. And yet the fall of the Convent symbolised the fall of Notting Hill. Now there are Liberal MPs and magistrates and worse living in the houses on the other side of Ladbroke Grove. I saw Moorcock putting something in his pocket. It was obvious he was looking for money.
Pretending to take photographs of miscellaneous piles of burning timber and smouldering plaster, of the few trees the machines had left standing, he would stoop and rub the mud from some object, some cracked cup or empty bottle. Most of the time he threw his discoveries away, but clearly he was occasionally lucky. I recalled some old talk of a treasure, of tunnels and secret escapes, but this was a familiar chimera. I for one had learned no longer to pursue them. Noting that Moorcock went back to the ruins every evening after the demolishers had knocked off, I was one day enough ahead of him to leave four old pennies and a threepenny bit on a slab of masonry near the altar below the dramatic crucifixion whose vivid greens, reds and yellows still blazed their message to the world. I left through the wire fence they had put up along Latimer Road and returned via Kensington Park Road to Blenheim Crescent in time to see him digging around in the rubble, taking miscellaneous pictures as usual, pausing to stare almost bewilderedly about him as if he had for a moment lost his bearings. At other moments he seemed physically to be tasting the tragedy of this 20th-century destruction, this proof that Faith had again given way to Speculation. When he had at last left I hurried through the gloomy evening, over the mud and ruins to the altar. The money was gone, of course. I told Mrs Cornelius. She laughed and said he was probably looking for souvenirs. It keeps him happy, she said. ‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Theft is supposed to keep you happy?’
They are all the same, these people.
I can remember no sense of discomfort from my incarceration in El Glaoui’s prison. My mind was too keenly focused, I think, on avoiding the anxieties of what was to come. I already understood that this night was the luxury I would look upon with nostalgia and I tried to make the most of it, but it is difficult to exercise one’s sensibilities in such circumstances, as the air grows staler and the silence of the prison begins to echo with little cries and groans, with whispers and prayers, which means that the jailer is momentarily absent. Some of the wetter, more mutilated sounds, said Mr Mix, were beginning to get on his nerves. He began to tell me a wild tale of how, when he had his cinema seized, the US Consul had offered him work as an agent, getting them, as he said, ‘the goods on the Pasha’. In turn they loaned him a good-quality camera. But they could give him no official help. ‘I guess I was right. The US Consul won’t welcome me back in Casablanca. I hate to imagine what the Pasha’s going to do to us.’
I knew all too well what was in store for us. I was tempted to share vicariously in the Pasha’s forthcoming pleasure and tell Mr Mix what parts of his body would be altered first, but in the end my ordinary humanity stilled my tongue. There was no point in panicking the poor negro. It would only make him sweat, and the air was bad enough already. So I let him continue with his elaborate tale of spies and international intrigue. He described a vast complex of rivalries, in which Italy played an increasingly dominant part. This, said Mr Mix, was not wholly to the United States’ taste. His job was to get a detailed plan of the Pasha’s strengths as well as his financial needs and sexual predilections. It was a story I could believe of some Hungarian Secret Service plot, but not of the United States Government. Once, my irritation got the better of me and I told him the whole thing sounded as if he had been reading too many dime novels. In turn this brought me to recalling my idyll with Miss von Bek over the Sahara and I began to pass my time by resurrecting those moments until I had remembered virtually the entire action and some of the dialogue of The Tyneside Leopard Men up to those final scenes where Blake, that exemplary Englishman, clambers from the wreckage of the glider and addresses the remains of the evil Cult as they advance towards him. ‘I warn you, my dear baroness, gentlemen, I have a Smith and Wesson in my hand and I know how to use it.’ If Sexton Blake were at this moment in Morocco it would not be long before I were free. But it seemed I must reconcile myself to an eternity of torment. My night was spent in humble prayer.
In the morning Hadj Idder personally brought us fruit and coffee. He seemed to feel a certain remote concern for us. He had our upper bodies released but our legs remained manacled. As we ate he read to us from the French newspaper. Mr Noel Coward and his people were staying at the Transatlantique and that evening were to be El Glaoui’s guests before the Pasha was called away on military business in the south. ‘What a pity you will miss him. Mustafa will be working on your feet about then. He is a very witty man in French and even more in English, they say.’ He lost interest in the paper and stood idly looking about the cell as we ate, turning what was left of the Jew’s skull with his slippered foot. “They did this themselves,’ he offered. ‘They sent the head here. They did not wish the Pasha to relax his protection of the mellah.’ He looked at us with sudden enquiry as if it were important to him to be believed. His beloved master’s reputation was as ever his chief concern.