Perhaps he would sell his soul to the Devil and achieve immortality. He’d been thinking about it. He had the spell written out on a slip of paper in his breast pocket; the voodoo doctor had assured him that it worked.
He was clad in an immense black cloak with a burgundy silk lining, which imparted to him the air of a stage magician, which in a way he was. (Now you see me, now you don’t.) On his head he wore a homburg, on his eyes tinted glasses. His sideburns were reddish brown. Of course they were not his sideburns. Not strictly speaking. Thinking about his false whiskers cheered him up and he swung his silver-topped cane. He hummed an old-fashioned tune. I am the pride of Piccadilly, the blase roue.
He rather enjoyed wearing disguise, always had. He found it liberating. Each time he wore disguise he felt like a butterfly that had broken from its chrysalis and taken wing. His disguise at the moment was of the minimal kind. He liked taking risks. He delighted in pushing his luck. It occurred to him that he possessed the full Byronic equipment of noble lineage, unorthodox imagination, a restless spirit and a daring soul.
He found staying at the Ritz irksome; he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason for it. He didn’t relish walking up and down Piccadilly either. He thought he did, but he didn’t. Too many people of little or no distinction, rather common-looking, in fact; a great stumbling mass; a herd of accursed canaille following their hackneyed inclinations.
He had never been in a crowd before. Nothing as intolerable as a crowd had ever been imposed on his person. He hated to be touched. He’d rather swim Lake Maracaibo than allow himself to be touched. Why did they keep touching him? He felt like raising his stick and hitting out left and right, then right and left. Swish-swish. It would be like topping nettles.
He looked foreign, he supposed, with his bleached eyebrows and polished mahogany complexion, but then most of the people who bumped into him also looked foreign, which wasn’t something he approved of. Not in England, at any rate. It was all too disorienting for words. It gave him a headache.
England was going to the dogs, no doubt about it.
There was nothing like a walk round St James’s, he found, to get his bile flowing. He had always been aware of a strong anti-Establishment streak in him.
He detested the ‘distinguished’ hatters, gunsmiths and boot-makers, the ‘exclusive’ shops selling unbelievably small, exorbitantly priced fiddly bits connected with fly-fishing, the whole area designed predominantly for a certain type of elderly pinstriped pillar of the Establishment. But most of all he hated the gentlemen’s clubs, those middens of priggishness and betrayal.
It was only with great difficulty that he resisted the temptation to pay his old club a visit and wreak some kind of havoc inside. He would have enjoyed smashing a gilded mirror or two with his stick, knocking off old Rees-Mogg’s glasses or punching a hole in that portrait of Baden-Powell. Oh, how his hands itched!
The management had blackballed him a couple of years back, the moralizing morons. He couldn’t remember the reason for his expulsion. Well, he didn’t think much of them either. Smug, small-minded nincompoops, mostly rather inept, quite absurd, leading puzzled, barren lives — like children standing at a grave, searching futilely for the secret of life. He had no patience with them. Not worth his wrath, really.
The moment you learnt to speak, you dedicated your new faculty to unsettling or outraging people. That was what a tedious old uncle of his, long dead, had once told him. His French governess had babbled about his mauvaises habitudes. He had been the proverbial demon child. He remembered Deirdre, his late wife, telling him that he was evil in a rather old-fashioned kind of way, whatever that might mean.
No, he mustn’t do anything that would attract attention. They would most certainly try to arrest him if he did, which would be a bore. He mustn’t let the police take a close look at him. Or, rather, at Peter Quin. Which of course was the same thing. He kept forgetting.
There is no difference between continued affectation and reality. It was Congreve or someone who wrote that.
Yes. Quite.
He sat on a bench in Green Park, yawned prodigiously and stared before him for what seemed an age. He pushed his underlip out petulantly, always an ominous sign to those who knew him. His scowl deepened. He was bored. A dark despondency had him in its grip and he could see no future for the human race. He’d been hurl’d from th’ethereal sky, down to this bottomless perdition, here to dwell. Not in adamantine chains and penal fire, true, though that afforded him little consolation.
He hated being at a loose end. He felt like a shark out of water. He had an acute sense of anticlimax. He didn’t think anonymity suited his temperament. Despatching couriers with horns to clear the roads for his passage would have been more his style.
Gripping his silver-topped stick between his gloved hands, he thrashed at a pigeon. His mood then suddenly improved. He rose. Moments later he was back in Piccadilly, standing in front of a shop window, admiring his reflection. He reminded himself that he belonged to that stratospheric breed of men to whom the world was but a lump of clay, infinitely pliable to their wants and whims.
‘What I want,’ he mouthed at his reflection, ‘is a pair of wings. Black wings. They’ve got to be black.’
He found exactly the kind of wings he wanted half an hour later at a little shop in Covent Garden, which specialized in different kinds of theatrical paraphernalia. Black wings, something funereal about them, rather sinister, exactly as he had envisaged them.
‘Are these real feathers? I like the feel of feathers nearly as much as I like the feel of fur. I am going to wear ’em, you know,’ he said as he watched the young man place the wings inside a rectangular tulip-red box. ‘Soon.’
The shop assistant, accustomed to eccentric customers, gave a polite smile.
Looking round at the grinning masks on the shelves, he thought of the Grimaud. He hadn’t seen the arrival of the magnificent white hearse drawn by plumed horses, but the knowledge that it had been there was enough for him. He liked putting on a show even when he was not around to see it.
Purchasing the wings put him in a state of reckless excitement. He attempted to trip up a barbaric blob of a woman with his stick and stuck out his tongue at a little boy, then had a Cuba Libre with gin at the Criterion, which further raised his spirits, though he intensely disliked the girl who served him.
The silly creature was plump and she seemed to find the sight of him comical, for some reason. The flaming cheek of it! She had clapped her hand over her mouth.
He eyed her with a glare of indescribable malignancy, which only seemed to provide her with further amusement. His face turned the colour of raspberry jam. The impudent hussy clearly had no idea who he was; she couldn’t possibly know that his pedigree had been established in a direct line by genealogists from the year 65 of the Christian era and that he had been brought up in a house where most objects had at one time or other been owned or handled by a king or an emperor! He nearly complained to the management about her but decided against it. Fuss was so middle-class.
He would stay at Remnant a while. Not for too long, goodness, no. He would be bored. But he would stay long enough.
His thoughts turned to Clarissa. Clarissa was not plump. Far from it. Clarissa was imperially slender, with the delicious, delicate curves of a succubus fashioned in dreams …
I am a traveller in an arid desert, he thought, but there is an oasis in sight.
He would drive. He would rent a car. Apart from Clarissa, there would be no one else at Remnant. No servants. Not even Tradewell, who had always gazed at him with a rather pathetic expression of awed devotion on his face. He had instructed Clarissa to keep the place empty and she had done so.