The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 8

  ‘Who are you calling a… what did you just say…?’

  Roly unwisely plucked the bottle out of the ice bucket and hefted it like a club. Champagne frothed out of the neck, drenching the cuff of his salmon-coloured shirt. He swung the bottle towards Richard’s head.

  Whitney quick-jabbed two knuckles into Roly’s side, just above the rib-cage. He froze in mid-swing, then – as Whitney innocently sipped from her flute – fell like a tree in the forest. Richard caught the bottle.

  It was empty. He signalled for another.

  Roly lay, face knotted, unable to move. His friends expressed concern, but none ventured to help.

  ‘How long does that last?’ Richard asked.

  ‘About ten minutes, usually.’

  The barman summoned someone to take care of the fallen exec. If Roly were not a guest, he’d be discreetly ejected from the hotel. If he were, he’d be asked to leave as soon as his bill was settled.

  Whitney shrugged, disarmingly, at the pest’s friends and eggers-on.

  ‘What can I do,’ she said, raising her voice to carry across the acreage of the bar. ‘I’m naturally a knockout.’

  Laughter came.

  ‘Roly’s not usually that much of a prawn,’ said one of his mates. ‘It’s moon madness.’

  Richard understood.

  More champagne was produced.

  ‘We’ll avoid further altercations if this is sent up to the lady’s suite,’ Richard told the waiter, palming him a ten-shilling note in a handshake.

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘And more strawberries,’ said Whitney. ‘Many more strawberries.’

  * * *

  ‘What are we doing outside Handel’s house?’ Whitney asked.

  ‘Waiting for a bus,’ he told her.

  After breakfast at Claridge’s, they had walked a little way down Brook Street. London was busier this morning. Most folk who had skived off to watch the launch were back at work. Tourists had emerged to wander distractedly. Richard didn’t have to be especially empathic to pick up the epochal beat in the back of everyone’s mind.

  We’re on our way to the moon…

  Whitney wore a lime-green trouser suit and matching sunhat. She had clever glasses which darkened when the sun came out – a NASA by-product, like non-stick pans and velcro. Oh, and like the orbital death rays America thought her NATO allies didn’t know about. Those ‘communications satellites’ would blow up if activated, thanks to a tiny pre-stressed ceramic component manufactured in Milton Keynes. In trying to cut plucky little Britain out of the loop, the Pentagon underestimated Harold Wilson’s capacity for sulky vengefulness.

  ‘There’s no stop here,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not a regularly scheduled service. We’re going to a party in a bus.’

  ‘Very stylish. Is it a long ride?’

  ‘As long as you want it to be. I didn’t say we’re going in a bus to a party, I said we’re going to a party in a bus. Here it is.’

  Richard pulled a psychedelic explosion out of his hankie pocket and flapped it, as if flagging a taxi. A red London bus stopped for them. The number and destination ‘∞ Far Out Scene’. Richard helped Whitney onto the open rear platform.

  ‘Hold very tight please,’ said a woman in a tailored black silk conductor’s uniform. ‘Ting ting.’

  The conductress rang the bell and the bus moved on.

  Both decks heaved with assorted people – fragrant hippies and flower children, pinstriped Establishment types, famous faces from fashion and sport, notable beggars and crooks, popular scientists and unpopular clergymen, a couple of exotic dancers from Soho. Something intriguing if non-sexual was happening under a pile of PVC macs between an angry Liverpool poet, an actress who’d been in a controversial Wednesday Play and a middle-aged cleaning woman who’d probably got on the wrong bus by mistake.

  Upstairs, Eric Clapton and Andrés Segovia were duetting. The tune they had long left behind was ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’. Downstairs, Larry Adler played harmonica while Spike Milligan made up limericks. Luckily, there were many rhymes for ‘moon’. Silver-paper stars, planets, satellites and spaceships were stuck up on the windows. It was easy to guess the theme of this bash.

  ‘Richard Jeperson,’ exclaimed the conductress, kissing him full on the lips, ‘how delightful! And this must be the blond Yank bird you were glimpsed with in Clerkenwell yesterday afternoon and Claridge’s bar last night! Don’t tell me, Whitney Gauge. With the, um, secret busybody acronym folks… you’re the Girl from A.U.N.T.I.E., right?’

  ‘I’m with a Federal Bureau of—’

  ‘Spookery and Goblinage. How sweet.’

  Whitney was surprised the conductress was in on the secret, but Richard knew her of old.

  ‘This is Margery Device,’ he said. ‘Pronounced “Davis”, spelled “De Vice”. She’s the Witch.’

  Whitney noticed the definite article.

  ‘Don’t listen to Dickie,’ Margery said. ‘It’s just a title.’

  ‘This party is a grand tradition,’ Richard said. ‘It’s always on somewhere in London.’

  ‘Have a cocktail, dear,’ said Margery. ‘They’re all just invented. Absinthe Apollo, Moon Madness, Space Shiver, Fireball XL-5, Buzz Aldrin…’

  ‘I’ll have a Rum Collins.’

  ‘Not new, but topical – I approve,’ said Margery, signalling to a Maltese bar-tender Richard had last seen on an identity parade as a near-lookalike for a trunk murderer. ‘Richard…?’

  ‘Tizer. I’m on duty.’

  Margery laughed.

  The hostess was Queen of London Gossip, which meant she knew everything worth knowing and was prepared to be wildly indiscreet if it amused her. The only secret she never shared was her age. She looked exactly as she had when he first went to her party – then in a sculptor’s studio in Brixton – in the mid-1950s. The London Witch held up one corner of a defensive magic square which had seen the city through plague, fire, blitz and rationing.

  ‘Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?’ he asked Margery.

  ‘No, of course not, silly boy. There’s only somewhere loud.’

  Richard sipped his Tizer. Whitney at least looked at her cocktail.

  ‘You’ll be here about Bridget Tully, of course. Cross-eyed, you know. Odd in a painter. Had an affair with—’

  ‘Magister Rex Chalfont.’

  ‘No, that’s not the name I was thinking of. It was the polar explorer. Not him himself – the fellow who played him in Scott of the Antarctic. It’ll come to me in a moment. I can see the face.’

  ‘It’s Chalfont we’re interested in,’ said Whitney.

  ‘I daresay you are, my girl. An interesting sort of chap. Not a name you hear every day, either.’

  ‘Not a name some of us have heard ever, Margery.’

  The conductress gave Richard a sly smile. He hadn’t believed she didn’t remember the exact name of every lighting assistant and walk-on penguin in Scott of the Antarctic, much less one of the principal cast. And he didn’t believe her casual assumption they knew as much about Chalfont as she evidently did.

  Margery fairly chortled. To the point of crowing.

  ‘Are your filing cabinets coming up short? Did you only drop in to my “happening” to quiz poor old Marge about an information gap you shouldn’t ought to have? You’ll hurt my feelings.’

  Richard laughed with her.

  ‘Fair enough. You win. The Diogenes Club are amateur dabblers beside you, Margery. I don’t know why we even bother to get out of bed most mornings. But if you could see your way to help…’

  ‘Quid pro quo, Dickie. Payment in kind.’

  ‘As you’ve pointed out, there’s an imbalance. You have all the secrets.’

  She coyly chewed the corner of a roll of bus-tickets Richard guessed were impregnated with something lysergic. ‘Not all…’

  ‘All of ours. And all of Agent Gauge’s too.’

  ‘’Tis true. I’m terribly well informed. Would you like to
know who the first homosexual in space was?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  Margery tutted.

  ‘Very well, but you’re usually much more fun, Dickie. Now, I shall point you in a useful direction, on the condition that…’

  Richard waited for it.

  ‘…the lovely Whitney answers one single question. With gory details. Truth or dare, without the dare.’

  Whitney shrugged. Richard hoped Margery wasn’t going to ask something indiscreet about President Nixon. Or dredge up that old one about J. Edgar Hoover’s dressmaker.

  Margery leaned over, cupping her hand over her mouth, and whispered in the woman’s ear. Whitney looked slightly shocked, then amused. She blushed in penny-size cheek-spots, like a cartoon character. Margery, eager, turned her own ear to receive – and Whitney whispered into it for what seemed a full five minutes. A smile spread across Margery’s face, with pauses for knowing looks at Richard and mocking tuts of sham disapproval.

  ‘I suppose I should have known…’

  ‘All right,’ said Richard, ‘you’ve had your fun facts for the day, Margery. Now… Rex Chalfont?’

  ‘Don’t know the man,’ said Margery, offhand. Richard groaned. ‘But I know of him.’

  Richard and Whitney listened, intently.

  ‘In 1948, the Chalfont Group offered to conquer the moon. For Britain.’

  If Chalfont had a group, Richard didn’t imagine they were aiming for the pop charts.

  ‘He was a rocket scientist?’

  ‘No, Dickie. How many rocket scientists call themselves “magister”? He’s one of those interdisciplinary fellows who mix runes and equations. You know what Artie Clarke always says about advanced technology being “indistinguishable from magic”? Chalfont responds that magic is indistinguishable from magic too. He promised he’d get to the moon before anyone relying on “Nazi fireworks”.’

  ‘So, a nut?’

  ‘A nut we should have paid more attention to,’ said Margery.

  ‘Because he had his old girlfriend stabbed?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. Someone would have stabbed Bridget Tully eventually. An art critic, most likely. No, we should have paid attention because he did what he said he would.’

  ‘Conquered the moon?’

  ‘That’s the whisper. He did it in 1953. In time for the Coronation. Chalfont has always been very patriotic. I suppose Everest got all the headlines.’

  ‘You’re having us on,’ said Richard.

  Margery looked genuinely offended.

  ‘Have I ever misled you?’

  ‘Not directly.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Whitney. ‘In three days’ time, the Eagle will touch down in the Sea of Tranquillity, Neil Armstrong will clamber down his ladder with the Stars and Stripes, and come across a British flag and… what else? A tea and crumpets stand? A statue of Winston Churchill? Art students holding a “Yankee Go Home” banner?’

  Margery was briefly serious. ‘I don’t think Sexy Rexy will let it come to that. If he’s got rid of his High Priestess, who was in the moderate wing of the Chalfont Group, he’ll have decided to haul down the Union Jack, fly the Jolly Roger and… well, prepare to repel boarders.’

  It took seconds for that to sink in.

  Whitney looked at Richard. He saw her mouth drop open exactly the way he knew his had. Space-time upended itself and turned inside out like a sock. Arthur C. Clarke would strongly disapprove.

  ‘In the Lake District,’ said Margery, ‘about five miles from Scafell Pike. On the Buttermere road, you take the turn-off marked “Private Road – Trespassers Will Be Dealt With Harshly”. You can’t miss it.’

  Richard was jolted out of his mind-expanding fugue.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Your next question was, or should have been, “Where is Mildew Manor”?’

  Richard supposed he should be grateful Margery had told them what she knew, and understood it was unreasonable to wish she’d volunteered all this some time in the last sixteen years. What happened on the moon was irrelevant to her bailiwick. She had enough on her plate looking after London, without worrying about satellites or stars. Still, a quiet heads-up wouldn’t have hurt.

  ‘Stop the bus,’ he said. ‘We want to get off.’

  They were in Piccadilly Circus.

  Margery rang her bell, and said, ‘Ting ting, please take care while leaving the omnibus, and toodle-oo.’

  * * *

  ‘How could anyone land on the moon in secret?’ asked Whitney. ‘In 1953?’

  ‘I don’t suppose people looked at the skies as much then,’ Richard mused.

  ‘A rocket launch is hard to keep quiet.’

  ‘Ahem, Sputnik…’

  ‘We knew about Sputnik,’ she said. ‘We just let Khrushchev have his big day and pretended to be surprised. Do you know how much the covert intelligence and arcane enforcement budget went up the day after all the senators and congressmen found out a red eye in the sky could see into their swimming pools?’

  They were in St James’s Park, watching ducks on the lake. Defectors, spies, tramps and shady dealers congregated in twos on the benches. Wardens who picked up litter with spiked sticks here had a higher security clearance than the Secretary of State for Defence. Old government secrets, obsolete weapons plans and two-way mirror compromising filmstrips were always found in the grass – along with bloody Sky-Ray lolly wrappers, of course.

  ‘Magister Rex Chalfont doesn’t believe in rockets,’ mused Richard. ‘“Nazi fireworks”. Ergo, no rocket launch.’

  ‘How else are you going to get to the moon? Build a stairway to Heaven?’

  ‘A diving bell shot out of a volcano?’

  She knew this game. ‘The chariot drawn by geese.’

  ‘Cavorite.’

  ‘Dew.’

  ‘Astral projection.’

  Whitney had pause. ‘That’s not so lunatic.’

  ‘Ha-ha. Neither is antigravity paint.’

  ‘Chalfont is a magus, right? A sorcerer.’

  ‘A flying sorcerer.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Picture this… the great Pooh-Bah – and his circle or group or whatever – sit around omming like lamas and go into a trance. Their spirits leave their bodies, then float to the moon.’

  Richard conceded that was more likely than geese or gunpowder.

  It was also comforting. There were recognised procedures for dealing with astral projectors. You found out where their entranced bodies were laid up and shouted ‘wakey-wakey’ in their ears. Not a few snuffed themselves by forgetting to nip home and eat, or secreted fragile flesh in places impregnable to enemies which also happened to be airtight. Most who learned the trick were just nosey parkers, anyway… Some nights, three or four at a time collided ectoplasmically in Liz Taylor’s bedroom. The odd adept managed to create a semi-solid ghost body, and could use the old ‘I was dozing at the theatre in full view of the whole audience when that shadowy wraith stoved in my wife’s head with a brick’ alibi.

  A commotion of some sort was underway on Duck Island, across the lake. Birds in a tizzy. Like the Trafalgar Square pigeons, the St James’s ducks had gone hungry for days while everyone was watching the telly. Perhaps there was lingering resentment at the abandonment of Francis Godwin’s waterfowl-based space programme. No ducks, no Duck Dodgers.

  ‘Astral projection to the moon is a new one on me,’ he admitted. ‘In all known cases of out-of-the-body wandering, a filament connects the projected consciousness – in whatever form it takes – back to the physical corpus. A quarter-million-mile sticky string is, to put it mildly, a stretch.’

  The ducks quacked up a fuss on the water now, scrapping over floating crumbs, beating each other with tough wings. The disturbance on the island had spread.

  ‘Didn’t some turn-of-the-century mediums claim to be star voyagers?’

  Richard remembered the file.

  ‘Yes, that’s why it’s called astral projection. But the Club never
took them seriously. If they went anywhere during their trips, it wasn’t in our universe. One dotty lady claimed she’d been impregnated by an Arcturan, but the baby popped out human. We kept tabs on the lad, of course. Grew up to be a very useful bowler for Leicestershire.’

  ‘Now you’re talking mumbo-jumbo. As far as I’m concerned, cricket is a chirruping insect. Or that squeaker who bugs Pinocchio.’

  ‘Says the girl from the he-man, steak-eating cowboy country whose rugby players need to cower inside six inches of leather armour so they don’t hurt their little headsies and toesies.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Actually, you’re right about football,’ she conceded.

  ‘American football,’ he corrected her.

  ‘Those guys are sissies who can’t take competition without throwing a fit.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let you play, then?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Not after I broke my brother’s leg by accident.’

  ‘Were you playing rough while baby-sitting the little fellow?’

  ‘Not my younger brother Brad. My older brother Trap. The Marine. He was on leave from Vietnam.’

  The ducks were tearing into each other now. Feathers and blood-slicks floated on the lake.

  ‘That’s not right,’ said Richard.

  Whitney saw it too. In the agitated water was a rippling reflection which shouldn’t be there. It looked like the moon.

  Then the ducks fell silent, stopped attacking each other.

  They paddled, turning in sync like a water ballet corps – and wound up looking directly at Richard and Whitney, aimed like the guns of pirate raiders.

  ‘That’s definitely not right.’

  He had a flash of Sky-Ray Roly, the moment his eyes blanked and he reached for the champagne bottle.

  Moon madness, again?

  Richard and Whitney stood still.

  Ranks of ducks advanced, sculling with wing-points. Eyes and beaks glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘Look, Mum,’ said a passing child, dripping ice-cream in his paw.

  ‘Come away, dear, and don’t bother the nice people.’

  ‘But Mu-u-um!’

  Mother and son moved on. The first ducks were off the lake, waddling on the grass. The lack of quack was disturbing.

  Richard sighed inwardly. He really did not want to be seen running away from a horde of ducks in St James’s Park. Margery Device would never let him hear the last of it.