East, West (11 page)

Lucy left us to ourselves and he spoke soberly and with apparent objectivity about the schizophrenia. It seemed hard to believe that he had just driven blind-folded
down a motorway against the traffic. When the madness came, he explained, he was ‘barking’, and capable of the wildest excesses. But in between attacks, he was ‘perfectly normal’. He said he’d finally come to see that there was no stigma in accepting that one was mad: it was an illness like any other,
voilà tout.

‘I’m on the mend,’ he said, confidently. ‘I’ve started work again, the Owen Glendower book. Work’s fine as long as I keep off the occult stuff.’ (He was the author of a scholarly two-volume study of overt and covert occultist groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, entitled
The Harmony of the Spheres.
)

He lowered his voice. ‘Between ourselves, Khan, I’m also working on a simple cure for paranoid schizophrenia. I’m in correspondence with the best men in the country. You’ve no idea how impressed they are. They agree I’ve hit on something absolutely new, and it’s just a matter of time before we come up with the goods.’

I felt suddenly sad. ‘Look out for Lucy, by the way,’ he whispered. ‘She lies like a whore. And she listens in on me, you know. They give her the latest machines. There are microphones in the fridge. She hides them in the butter.’

Eliot introduced me to Lucy in a kebab house on Charlotte Street in 1971, and though I hadn’t seen her for
ten years I recognised at once that we had kissed on the beach at Juhu when I was fourteen and she was twelve; and that I was anxious to repeat the experience. Miss Lucy Evans, the honey-blonde, precocious daughter of the boss of the famous Bombay Company. She made no mention of kisses; I thought she had probably forgotten them, and said nothing either. But then she reminisced about our camel-races on Juhu beach, and fresh coconut-milk, straight from the tree. She hadn’t forgotten.

Lucy was the proud owner of a small cabin cruiser, an ancient craft that had once been a naval longboat. It was pointed at both ends, had a makeshift cabin in the middle and a Thorneycroft Handybilly engine of improbable antiquity which would respond to nobody’s coaxings except hers. It had been to Dunkirk. She named it
Bougainvillaea
in memory of her childhood in Bombay.

I joined Eliot and Lucy aboard
Bougainvillaea
several times, the first time with Mala, but subsequently without her. Mala, now Doctor Mala, Doctor (Mrs) Khan, no less, the Mona Lisa of the Harrow Road Medical Centre, was repelled by that bohemian existence in which we did without baths and pissed over the side and huddled together for warmth at night, zipped into our quilted sacks. ‘For me, hygiene-comfort are
Priority A,’ said Mala. ‘Let sleeping bags lie. I-tho will stay home with my Dunlopillo and WC.’

There was a trip we took up the Trent and Mersey Canal as far as Middlewich, then west to Nantwich, south down the Shropshire Union Canal, and west again to Llangollen. Lucy as skipper was intensely desirable, revealing great physical strength and a kind of boaty bossiness that I found very arousing. On this trip we had two nights alone, because Eliot had to return to Cambridge to hear a lecture by a ‘top man from Austria’ on the subject of the Nazis and the occult. We saw him off at Crewe station and then ate a bad meal in a restaurant with pretensions. Lucy insisted on ordering a bottle of rosé wine. The waitress stiffened contemptuously. ‘The French for red, madam,’ she bellowed, ‘is
rouge.
’

Whatever it was, we drank too much of it. Later, aboard
Bougainvillaea
, we zipped our sleeping bags together and returned to Juhu beach. But at a certain moment she kissed my cheek, murmured ‘Madness, love’, and rolled over, turning her back on the too-distant past. I thought of Mala, my not-too-distant present, and blushed guiltily in the dark.

The next day, neither of us spoke of what had almost happened.
Bougainvillaea
arrived at a one-way tunnel at the wrong time; but Lucy didn’t feel like waiting three hours for her right of way. She ordered me to go ahead with a torch along the narrow towpath inside the tunnel, while she brought the boat on behind me at a crawl. I had no idea what she’d do if we met anyone coming towards us, but my journey along the slippery, broken towpath required all my attention, and anyway, I was only the crew.

Our luck held; we emerged into the daylight. I had been wearing a white cricket sweater which was now bright red, stained indelibly by mud from the tunnel walls. There was mud in my shoes and in my hair and on my face. When I wiped my sweating forehead a lump of mud fell into my eye.

Lucy whooped in triumph at our illegal success. ‘Made a lawbreaker of you at last, bloody wonderful,’ she hollered. (As a youth, in Bombay, I had been notoriously Good.) ‘You see? Crime does pay, after all.’

Madness. Love.
I remembered the rosé and the tunnel when I heard about Eliot’s high-speed escapade. Our adventures aboard
Bougainvillaea
by night and by day had been as dangerous, in their way. Forbidden embraces and a wrong-way journey in the dark. But we
weren’t shipwrecked, and he wasn’t killed. Just lucky. I suppose.

Why do we lose our minds?

‘A simple biochemical imbalance,’ was Eliot’s view. He insisted on driving home from the Jubilee bonfire, and as he accelerated through blind corners on lightless country roads, various biochemicals surged, off-balance, through my veins as well. Then, without warning, he braked hard and stopped. It was a clear night with a moon. On the hillside to our right were sleeping sheep and a small fenced-off graveyard.

‘I want to be buried here,’ he announced.

‘No can do,’ I answered from the back seat. ‘You’d have to be dead, you see.’

‘Don’t,’ said Lucy. ‘You’ll only give him ideas.’

We were teasing him to conceal the quaking within, but Eliot knew we had registered the information. He nodded, satisfied; and accelerated.

‘If you wipe us out,’ I gasped, ‘who’ll be left to remember you when you’re gone?’

When we got back to Crowley End he went straight to bed without a word. Lucy looked in on him a while later and reported that he’d fallen asleep fully clothed, and grinning. ‘Let’s get drunk,’ she suggested brightly.

She stretched out on the floor in front of the fire.
‘Sometimes I think everything would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t rolled away,’ she said. ‘I mean, on the boat.’

Eliot met his demon for the first time when he was finishing
The Harmony of the Spheres.
He had quarrelled with Lucy, who had moved out of the doll’s house in Portugal Place. (When she came back to him she found that in her absence he had not put out a single milk-bottle. The massed bottles stood in the kitchen, one for each day Lucy and Eliot had been apart, like seventy accusations.)

One night he woke at three a.m., convinced of the presence downstairs of something absolutely evil. (I remembered this premonition when Lucy told me how she woke up at Crowley End, certain that he was dead.)

He picked up his Swiss army knife and descended, stark naked (as Lucy would be naked, in her turn), to investigate. The electricity wasn’t working. As he neared the kitchen he felt arctically cold and found that he had acquired an erection. Then all the lights went crazy, switching themselves on and off, and he made the sign of the cross with his arms and screamed,
‘Apage me, Satanas.’
Get thee behind me, Satan.

‘Whereupon everything went back to normal,’ he told me. ‘And, below decks, limp.’

‘You didn’t really see anything,’ I said, slightly disappointed. ‘No horns, or cloven hooves.’

Eliot was not the hyper-rationalist he claimed to be. His immersion in the dark arts was more than merely scholarly. But because of his brilliance, I took him at his own estimation. ‘Just open-minded,’ he said. ‘More in heaven and earth, Horatio, and so forth.’ He made it sound perfectly rational to sell a haunted house double-quick, even to lose money on the deal.

We were the most unlikely of friends. I liked hot weather, he preferred it grey and damp. I had a Zapata moustache and shoulder-length hair, he wore tweeds and corduroy. I was involved in fringe theatre, race relations and anti-war protests. He weekended on the country-house circuit, killing animals and birds. ‘Nothing like it to cheer a fellow,’ he said, winding me up. ‘Blasting the life out of one’s furry and feathered friends, doing one’s bit for the food chain. Marvellous.’ He gave a party the day after Edward Heath won the 1970 election –
Grocer Turns Cabinet Maker
, one newspaper declared – and mine was the only long face there.

Who knows what makes people friends? Something in the way they move. The way they sing off-key.

But in the case of Eliot and me, I do know, really. It was that old black magic. Not love, not chocolate: the Hidden Arts. If I find it impossible to let go of Eliot’s memory, it is perhaps because I know that the seductive arcana which drove Eliot Crane out of his mind almost ensnared me as well.

Pentangles, illuminati, Maharishi, Gandalf: necromancy was part of the
Zeitgeist
, of the private language of the counter-culture. From Eliot I learned the secrets of the Great Pyramid, the mysteries of the Golden Section and the intricacies of the Spiral. He told me about Mesmer’s theory of Animal Magnetism (
A responsive influence exists between the heavenly bodies, the earth and all animated bodies. A fluid universally diffused, incomparably subtle, is the means of this influence. It is subject to mechanical laws with which we are not yet familiar
) and the Four Trances of Japanese spiritualism:
Muchu
, that is, ecstasy or rapture;
Shissi, Konsui-Jotai
, or a coma;
Saimin-Jotai
, a hypnotic state; and
Mugen no Kyo
, in which the soul can leave the body behind and wander in the World of Mystery. Through Eliot I met remarkable men, or at least their minds: G.I. Gurdjieff, author of
Beelzebub’s Tales
and guru to, among others, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield and J.B. Priestley; and Raja Rammohun Roy and his
Brahmo Samaj, that brave attempt at making a synthesis of Indian and English thought.

Under my friend’s informal tutelage, I studied numerology and palmistry and memorised an Indian spell for flying. I was taught the verses that conjured up the Devil,
Shaitan
, and how to draw the shape that would keep the Beast 666 confined.

I never had much time for gurus back home where the word came from, but that’s what Eliot was, I confess with a blush. A mystical teacher in English translation; say it g’
roo
.

Reader: I flunked the course. I never experienced
Muchu
(much less
Mugen no Kyo
), never dared speak the Hell-raising spells, or jumped off a cliff, like some Yaquí
brujo
’s apprentice, to fly.

I survived.

Eliot and I practised putting each other under hypnosis. Once he implanted the post-hypnotic suggestion that if he should ever say the word ‘bananas’ I must at once remove all my clothes. That evening, on the dance-floor at Dingwall’s club with Mala and Lucy, he whispered his fruity malice into my ear. Rumbling, sleep-inducing waves began to roll heavily over me and even though I tried hard to fight them back my hands began to undress
me. When they began unzipping my jeans we were all thrown out.

‘You boys,’ Mala said disapprovingly as I dressed by the canal, swearing loudly and threatening dire revenges. ‘Maybe you should go to bed together and we-all can go home and get some rest.’

Was that it? No. Maybe. No. I don’t know.
No.

What a picture: a double portrait of self-deceivers. Eliot the occultist pretending to be an academic, with me, more prosaically, perhaps, half-lost in occult love.

Was that it?

When I met Eliot I was a little unhinged myself – suffering from a disharmony of my personal spheres. There was the Laura episode, and beyond it a number of difficult questions about home and identity that I had no idea how to answer. Eliot’s instinct about Mala and me was one answer that I was grateful for. Home, like Hell, turned out to be other people. For me, it turned out to be her.