The Ground Beneath Her Feet (45 page)

And Ravi Shankar, offers Ormus, trying to be friendly. But Tommy Gin has run out of Indians and can only nod furiously. Right, right, he nods, beaming.

Right, Ormus Cama concurs.

But what I’m saying—Gin returns to his embarrassed apology—is, back there, man, I laid a heavy trip on you, but it’s only because she’s always shitting with people’s heads, I mean, if you can believe it, she told me you were
Jewish
. You can dig that, man, you can see how that would, yeah. But you’re not, man, you’re just not. Oh, wow.

Hey, Indian guy, shouts Antoinette Corinth, waving a joint in a long cigarette holder. Perhaps you should teach me a few of your whatchoumacallit rope tricks. You seem to have tied the Queen up in knots, unless I’m
very
much mistaken.

Ormus Cama faced with Gin and Antoinette has the sense of having come into the presence of malignity. Gin doesn’t count: he’s a nasty pinprick, a squib. But from Antoinette Corinth there pours a barely disguised and vengeful malevolence. This is not that wise woman free of all bitterness eulogized by her sons over the pirate airwaves. This is a woman of such palpable vindictiveness that, even though he has no reason to believe he is the target of her venom, Ormus feels physically endangered. He begins, involuntarily, to back away, and bumps into
something hard in the dark. A rack of dresses falls to the floor, hangers clattering.

Hah! Hah! (Antoinette Corinth’s laugh is a heavy smoker’s retch.) The little dear. He’s simply terrified. Ormus, baby. Welcome to Unfold Road.

Mull Standish telephones that evening: Everything fine? She acting OK? And before Ormus can answer: Your musical future. I’m working on it. My plans are close to firmed up. Did you know the Georgie Fame record couldn’t get played on the BBC, and now, thanks to us, it’s a top three hit? That’s a big step. It proves the pirates’ power. And the next proof is you. Because if we can do it with an unknown, then we’re really calling the shots. We need to talk material. We need to talk musicians. We need to talk, period. Don’t ask me when. I’m on it. I’m way ahead of you. I’m already there. Be prepared.

There can be no doubting, in retrospect, that Mull Standish was in love with Ormus Cama: in pie-eyed, adolescent, moon-calf love. But he was also a man of quality, a person of character, and he kept his word. Never in all the years of their partnership did he sexually importune the artist whom he helped to build into a world superstar. Without Mull Standish—who put the band together, provided the instruments, booked the recording studios at his own cost and acted as his own promo man—there would certainly have been no Rhythm Center. And without Rhythm Center, there would have been no VTO.

That night on the phone, his first night at the maisonette over The Witch, Ormus remains sceptical: What do you want from me? he wants to know.

Mull Standish’s voice wavers fractionally, loses much of its rich timbre. My sons, he says, faltering. Put in a good word for me with my sons.

Which isn’t easy. Released from the captivity of Radio Freddie, Hawthorne and Waldo Crossley are busily opening the doors of perception. In their mother’s lair—zodiac on the ceiling, astrolabes, Ching sticks, fliers advertising Tibetan overtone chanting, cat, broomstick, the works—they lie semi-conscious, blissing out, with Mummy’s help.

They do like their lump sugar, Antoinette Corinth beams. After two
weeks, their poor tongues were just hanging out. And you, my Oriental prince? One lump or two?

In spite of a life spent in the allegedly exotic East, Ormus is not accustomed to meeting witches. Awkwardly cross-legged on an Afghan rug, he shifts his weight from haunch to haunch and declines the offered drug. Squinting through Antoinette’s chosen darkness, he registers the caged parrot, the Mexican chac-mool, the Brazilian samba drums. Books about the old religions of human sacrifice and blood. A sorceress with Latin accents. Ormus begins to finds it hard to take her seriously. This is an act, isn’t it, a posture, a game. In this “culture,” people have time for games. Maybe they never get past games. A “culture” of grown-up children.

Germs on a slide.

Antoinette notes Ormus’s interest in her paraphernalia, senses his scepticism, launches into a long self-justifying oration. “People are looking for something better. An alternative. And here’s this simply immense body of forbidden knowledge, absolutely coherent, fantastically erudite, the hidden learning of the entire human race, and all placed beyond the respectable pale. Why? Well, obviously. Because they don’t want us to have access to the power. The
nuclear
power of the secret arts.”

That’s some of it. Now Ormus begins to see and hear her more clearly. She sounds like a demagogue: self-righteous, a True Believer. She sounds like somebody covering up, using the half-digested rhetoric of the age’s lunatic fringe to lend colour to a life story of whose painful banality she is perhaps afraid. What is she, anyway? A tailor who got lucky in trade, but was unlucky in love. Two grown sons and an empty bed. It seems to Ormus that she infantilises her children, that feeding them hallucinogens is her way of keeping them babyish, helpless, dependent; of keeping them hers. In the grip of a sudden wave of nauseous revulsion against the spirit of the age, Ormus finds Antoinette Corinth hard to like: clutchy, a self-dramatist, shrill.

He asks if it’s permitted to use the drums. She is disappearing down the smoke rings of her mind, and waves, vaguely. Softly, eagerly, the silky twisting rhythms flow from his fingertips. It is as if the drums have been yearning to speak to him, and he to them. Finally, he thinks: at long last, here are friends.

Fucking Paradise, grunts Antoinette Corinth, and passes out. Ormus doesn’t care; he is lost in the samba, the carnival under his flying, beating hands.

Long after he has gone to bed on the floor below her he hears her wake and crash around upstairs. He hears odd chanting, the chinking of finger cymbals, a woman’s voice howling at the moon.

This England, addled by mysticism, mesmerised by the miraculous, the psychotropic, in love with alien gods, has begun to horrify him. This England is a disaster area, the old are destroying the young by sending them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves. He is having an essentially conservative response not only to the war but also to the countervailing laissez-faire of the age, a response that will intensify as he learns more about the place. A revolt against the damage, the waste, the self-inflicted wounds, the bedspread jackets, the swallowing of various forms of gibberish that has replaced the exercise of intelligence, the susceptibility to gurus and other phoney leaders, the flight from reason, the descent into an inferno of privilege.

In time he will write songs about this disaster area, songs that excoriate a generation lost in space, songs bursting with a savage indignation that will make them, by one of the ironic inversions of the culture, into anthems for the very people he is attacking. The dying, drifting, broken generation, which has told itself a great lie—that it represents hope and beauty—will hear the truth in Ormus Cama’s earthquake songs; will look in those cruel mirrors and see themselves. Ormus Cama will find his Western voice, in the words of M. Henri Hulot, by understanding what he is against. And, in the form of Vina, his one and only love, who he’s for.

When Sir Darius Xerxes Cama returned from his spirit-destroying trip to England he was interrogated about that country by his butler, Gieve, who had heard certain lies which he knew were too absurd to be true; but he needed Darius to confirm their falsehood:

They say, sir, that in U.K., if a man does not have a job, the government gives him money. If he does not have a house, the government gives him a pukka residence, not a
jopadpatti
shack on the pavement but a solid construction. If he or his family are sick, the government
pays for the hospital. If he can’t send his children to school, the government sends them free. And when he is old and useless, the government gives the good-for-nothing cash money every week for the rest of his life.

The idea that a government might behave in such a way seemed to offend Gieve’s sense of the natural order. When Darius confirmed the approximate accuracy of the assertions, the butler couldn’t stand it. He smacked his brow, shook his head, couldn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “In this case, sir,
why is anyone in U.K. ever unhappy?”

Why is anyone unhappy in this privileged corner of the globe? Yes, OK, the war, Ormus concedes. But does that excuse everything? Does it mean people can pour themselves down a drain and call it peace? Does it mean people can untie the strings of the world—
and hark, what discord follows
—and call it freedom?

His horror, his sense of foreboding, of wrongness and impending doom—cracks in the world, abysses, the four horsemen, all the anachronistic apparatus of millenarian eschatology—is increased by the knowledge of his own involuntary gift of visions, the holes in the real that manifest themselves to show him another reality, which he resists, though it beckons him to enter; for entry would feel—he knows this—very like insanity. Can it be this visionary madness, the thing he most fears within himself, that’s most in tune with his new world?

She comes to him near the end of the night, matter-of-factly joins him on his mattress, without emotion, under some sort of narcotic influence. Their sex, performed in the red-rimmed, bad-breath hours after the cold dawn, is unconvincing, bony, brief; dry frottage, like a duty. Like sex’s end: an old married couple’s last parched congress. Exhaustion claims them, and they sleep. In two weeks he’ll go back to the ship, and if somebody else sleeps here, She may also come to him, sleepwalking.

In the sky above them, Major Ed White is walking in space. He has stepped out of the frame. For fourteen minutes he is the ultimate outsider, the only sentient creature hanging above the Earth, outside the Gemini 4 spacecraft. Ecstatic, he has to be coaxed back into Gemini by his co-astronaut, his space twin.

There is a horse on tv called Mister Ed and Ormus Cama drifting
towards sleep allows himself to confuse the two. First centaur in space. Or Pegasus, the last of the winged horses, returning to our corrupt, post-classical times.

She takes him to a club called UFO to satisfy people’s need to believe in space creatures other than Major or even Mister Ed. Coloured oils squeezed between glass slides pulse to the music. Hairy heads nod in time, like windscreen poodles. There is much pungent smoke. What is he doing here in this wasted dark when Vina is somewhere else, waiting. Or not waiting. While beside him, concealed in inarticulacy, She doodles on a napkin, decorating the word “unfold.” Her calligraphy finds the name of the club in the name of the street.
UnFOld Road
.

Even here, underground, he feels like the Gemini astronaut, floating, above, outside, watching. Bursting with ecstasy. Waiting to become.

By day he walks the city streets, looking for other Englands, older Englands, making them real. He eschews narcotic assistance. He is high on the place itself, its brilliant, familiar strangeness. To be utterly lost amidst buildings you recognize, to know nothing about a cityscape of which you have carried around, for years, what you thought to be an ample and sufficient storehouse of images, is a delirious enough experience. No funny cigarettes required. On the loaf, elated by the great dirty river, the grimy sunsets, Ormus Cama loses his heart, without warning, to the smell of fresh, leavened, white bread.

There was leavened bread in Bombay, but it was sorry fare: dry, crumbling, tasteless, unleavened breads paler, unluckier relation. It wasn’t “real.” “Real” bread was the chapati, or phulka, served piping hot; the tandoori nan and its sweeter Frontier variant, the Peshawari nan; and for luxury, the reshmi roti, the shirmal, the paratha. Compared to these aristocrats, the leavened white loaves of Ormus’s childhood seemed to merit the description which Shaw’s immortal dustman, Alfred Doolittle, dreamed up for people like himself: they were, in truth, the undeserving poor. They were nothing like the lavish loaves sitting plump and enticing, and for sale, in the windows of the capital’s many bakeries—the ABC chain, the Chelsea Bakery itself. Ormus Cama plunges into this new world, betraying, without a backward glance, the fabled breads of home.

Whenever he passes a bakery, he feels compelled to enter. The daily
purchase and consumption of quantities of bread is, in a way, his first wholeheartedly erotic encounter with London life. Ah, the soft pillowy mattressiness of it. The well-sprung bounciness of it between his teeth. Hard crust and soft centre: the sensuality of that perfect textural contrast. O White Crusty loaves of 1965, both sliced and unsliced! O small and large Tins, Danish Bloomers, flour-dusted Baps! O bread of heaven, bread of leaven, feed me till I want no more! In the whorehouses of the bakeries Ormus pays without a murmur for his encounters with the amorality of the loaf. It’s anybody’s, but once coin of the realm has been exchanged, these swallowed morsels, these love bites, are his and his alone. East is East, thinks Ormus Cama; ah, but yeast is West.

Standish has bought him a guitar. His pockets stuffed with fresh bread rolls, Ormus sits in parks and makes technical experiments, looking for the new voice that will match his new being, in this new world. What develops at first differs from the driving hard-rock delivery which he originally favoured, and to which he will always, when the spirit moves him, return. This new voice, however, is sweeter, higher, and the songs it sings have longer lines and more complex melodies that cross over and under one another, lifting and circling, like dancers. Mull Standish will choose to record one of these songs: “She (The Death of Conversation).”

(Tabla drums, rakataka takatak. A bouncing guitar. Horns. Waa whup-whup waa, waa whup-whup waa. A full, lush sound, nothing like the screech and thunder characteristic of the period. It sounds new. So does this voice, speaking in unexplained personal references, but somehow including the listener in its private world. A girl lies down in darkness, she asks why am I right on the floor, why am I right on the floor here, when the rest of my life is so wrong. I need a carnival costume, I want my day in the sunlight, don’t want to be a black cat in a back catalogue.)