Twenty-one

‘Welcome, friend. Welcome.’ The woman’s body filled the doorway. Her garishly painted face was one big smile. Apryl tried to stop her astonishment freezing on her face. She’d barely recovered her bearings after the journey up to the twenty-eighth floor in a vandalized elevator that stank of urine and worse, before walking through a dim warren of yellowing cement corridors to find the front door of the flat Harold had included in his precise instructions.

‘I’m Harriet, the host of our little gatherings, and the secretary of our illustrious society.’ Harriet threw her great head back and shrieked, as if what she said was so funny a full laugh never had the time to slip out naturally and became a half-scream instead. ‘But you can call me Figure of a Woman in Crisis. Many of the gentlemen do.’ Again the shrieked laugh.

Now Apryl was doing her utmost not to stare at the woman’s curious shape and ghastly apparel. A red velvet gown that swept about the floor had been draped over elephantine limbs and a thick torso. Great breasts festooned with strings of wooden beads stretched out the chest area. Thick but sloppily applied cosmetics lathered her doughy face, from which small watery eyes beamed with an intensity Apryl couldn’t look into, so the path of her stare directed itself to the woman’s large head. A turban of green and turquoise scarves was wrapped about Harriet’s skull and loosely fixed at the front by a silver brooch. Like oily cobwebs, long strands of white-grey hair slipped out from beneath the headdress. Instantly, Apryl thought her mad.

‘And you are Apryl. Our second special guest this evening.’ The woman’s podgy hands clamped on the outside of each of Apryl’s arms to pull her further into the hot perfumed air of the flat. As Harriet moved aside, a cluttered and crowded living room revealed itself.

Incense sticks fixed in wooden bases burned around the large front room. They were placed with gothic candlesticks on sloping piles of books and on cabinets filled with tarot decks, oils, Indian jewellery, crystals, small ornate chests and carved statuettes.

‘Come. Come. Wine?’ the woman said. ‘Harold Rackam-Atterton is here. Who I believe you have spoken to. We’re all so excited by your visit. So thrilled.’ Her tiny grey eyes widened with a fresh rush of excitement.

Apryl couldn’t stop herself looking down at where the woman’s jewelled hands held onto her arms. The fingernails were long, but uneven in length and yellow towards the tips. As if aware of their scrutiny, the hands disappeared.

‘Please. Wine would be lovely,’ Apryl said, nervously, and was steered between three men with long, thinning grey hair. Their clothes smelled of damp and old sweat.

Before a little table the huge woman slopped cheap Merlot into a wine glass. ‘I’ll just seize Harold and bring him hither.’ Somewhere inside that high enthusiastic voice Apryl sensed a tremble of hysteria.

A curious blend of discordant jazz music mixed with Gregorian chant and clanging industrial machinery was playing on a paint-spattered tape recorder, mounted on a wooden stool beside the entrance to the kitchen. About which two balding young men with intense faces whispered to each other. They both wore woollen trench coats and knee-length cavalry boots, like some new freakish subculture she was unaware of and doubted would catch on.

But for an apartment in a tower block the place was surprisingly big inside; it must have been designed for a family. Apryl even noticed a staircase leading up to another level. Between the worn and sagging furniture, dark bookcases, dried plants in amphoras and old photographs cluttering the walls, she spied some of the original decor. Very British; very seventies. In places a watery yellow paint appeared between the bric-a-brac and mismatching wooden picture frames. It was stained with rashes of black-spore fungus. She could smell its powdery wet rot amid the incense.

At least fifteen people had crammed into the living room and occupied most of the floor space. All of the guests appeared to have made some effort to dress, or half-dress, in vintage costume. Two of the men behind the sofa wore top hats, and Apryl glimpsed watch chains against their waistcoats. Others had adopted cravats for the evening. But despite their attempts at vintage styling, the gathering appeared universally dishevelled. Suit jackets were stained. Trouser legs too short. Waistlines heaved up too high. Dresses were creased beyond redemption. Everyone was overweight or unhealthily thin. And oh God, the teeth. Stained grey, or yellow from neglect, crooked, sloping or snaggled in their sunken or lipless mouths. British teeth. She wondered how they all managed to acquire such appalling mouths. She was not in the habit of dismissing people on account of their appearance, but she’d never seen such an extraordinarily ugly group of people assembled in one room.

Their dressing might have been sloppy and their grooming careless due to their eccentricity, because eccentric they certainly were, but she suspected another motive: they were displaying a wilful opposition to anything aesthetically pleasing. They had expanded or withered with no thought to the tastes of the world around them. It was as if they had made themselves deliberately grotesque. They could all be the living embodiment of a Felix Hessen drawing in ink and gouache.

Three of the five women present were seated together on a couch. They were middle-aged and all wearing veils over faces painted in an operatic style. Their thin bodies were draped in long, funereal dresses that suggested the First World War. Elbow-length lace gloves concealed their arms, but were fingerless from the first knuckle, revealing long nails, unpainted. The fourth woman was elderly and wore a floppy green hat with a sagging brim that concealed most of her small head. She sat like a little girl sunken into an armchair made for adults, and had struck an absurd aristocratic pose with her head. As soon as Apryl met the elderly creature’s eye a sharp, surreal peal of laughter erupted from its thin mouth. For no reason that Apryl could determine. The woman then raised her chin and resumed a grim, imperious expression in silence.

Harriet was back, pushing through rumpled jackets and straggly heads, and bullying aside a bundle of thin legs. Behind her bobbed a fat, elderly man who Apryl presumed was Harold. Thick glasses in brown plastic frames magnified his eyes to four times their normal size, set in a large head, pink and hairless save for a circle of wispy white hair that fell about the shoulders of his stained dinner jacket.

‘Ahhhh,’ Harold sighed, opening his small mouth to reveal sparsely furnished gums. But the breath that rolled from it made her feel faint and sick. It was silvery and rusted with bacteria. The few teeth that remained in his mouth were the colour of wet peanuts. ‘A bloodline that has brushed against the greatest mind in the canon of art history graces one of our gatherings. You are as rare as documents bearing his signature, my dear. But we must steer your fledgling scholarship on a more reliable path. I’d like to show you a small work of my own later. Fifteen years in the making. What I would call a critical appreciation of Hessen’s artistic vision in the style of a dream narrative, in order to suggest what the missing oils must have resembled.’

‘We’re publishing it through the society,’ Harriet said, with so much enthusiasm her whole body shook. ‘The cover illustration is by one of our own members. I can take an advance order tonight. We’re selling in royal hardback at ninety pounds. Signed.’

Apryl didn’t know what to say, but nodded and held a smile on her face until it ached. But she didn’t need to reply as Harold was keen to begin the introductions. Nor did she have to think of anything to say to the characters who shook her hand; as she was escorted about the room the members were only too pleased to do all of the talking. Elsewhere in their lives she sensed a lack of opportunity to converse.

‘Yes, the American lady,’ said an elderly man with a thin face and wild white hair brushed across his conical skull. ‘Harold mentioned you. Have you been to the British Library? It has some nice prints of the Contortions. Have you seen Figure of a Woman Clutching her Face? And Childbirth: Figure of a Dead Woman? They have good prints of those too.’

Apryl told him she hadn’t.

‘You simply must go to the Black Dog and the Guardsmen’s Rest for a drink,’ another man with a severe lisp said. ‘Hessen used to go there. With Bryant, the poet. Of course the names have changed, but the ceilings above the bars are still original.’ He blinked his eyes rapidly.

‘I can take you,’ said a portly man in a frock coat. He was drunk and stared at her legs.

‘Calm yourself, Roger. Calm yourself,’ Harold said, not without a hint of irritation, before guiding Apryl away to where the four ladies sat. Placing his plump fingertips on each of Apryl’s shoulders, he whispered conspiratorially in her ear, ‘You may find Alice a trifle strange at first. But, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that is rarely a bad thing. She is in her nineties. And is someone you really must meet. We treasure her at our gatherings. You see, she is the only one of us who ever met Hessen.’

Apryl started, shaken out of her awkwardness in an instant. ‘Met him?’

Harold smiled with satisfaction. His big watery eyes swam behind the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. ‘Knew him, to be precise, in the late thirties. While the great man was emerging from his Scenes After Death phase, as far as we can ascertain. But her memory. Well. Not what it was.’

Apryl remembered reading in Miles’s book about what difficult years the late thirties were for Hessen. He’d visited Germany in 1937, expecting to be embraced as a hero of the Third Reich, due to the admiration of fascist ideals that he had expressed in Vortex. But by that time Hitler had grown tired of the obscure mystics and cults that were part of the early inspiration for National Socialism. Not only did lower-level Nazi officials reject Hessen’s drawings and art theory, due to the growing abstraction and surrealism he dealt with, but they also refused his application to join the Waffen SS. So characteristic of a man accustomed to making more enemies than friends, Hessen had misjudged the value of his vision.

He returned home incandescent with rage and inconsolable at the thought of what he deemed a betrayal, only then to be imprisoned for his political affiliations shortly after Britain declared war, and kept behind bars until 1945.

‘And we also suspect she knew him after he came out of prison too, for a brief while.’ Harold grinned, and winked, so clearly aware of the importance of his final comment.

Hessen lacked any of the pedigree and connections of Mosley, or the achievements of Ezra Pound, to enjoy a relaxation of the infamy that surrounded him after the war. Miles Butler assumed this was the reason he’d hidden himself away in Knightsbridge. And even Mosley had distanced himself from Hessen by then, considering him ‘decadent and unsound of mind’. Only an occultist and explorer, Eliot Coldwell, had championed his art in the fifties because of its connection with an ‘unseen world’. And not until the late seventies was minor critical scrutiny turned again to his surviving work. Now it was only the Friends of Felix Hessen, their garish website, and their speculative limited-edition publications that kept his name alive. Apryl found it all miserable and depressing. Hessen’s legacy, his enthusiasts, his art. Had it not been for his connection to her great-aunt, she wouldn’t have given any of it a moment of her time, and she now wished she’d never come to this ridiculous gathering. What a place to end up on a Friday night in London.

Apryl perched herself on the arm of the chair into which Alice’s thin body had sunk. Harold stayed close. Three fingers still maintained contact with her shoulder as if ready to spirit her away in a hurry.

She offered a smile to the three veiled women. Chalky faces glared at her through black netting. They muttered a greeting, but waited eagerly to listen to her talk with Alice.

‘Hello, Alice, I’m Apryl,’ she said, leaning down towards the hunched figure to see beneath the brim of the green hat. ‘I hear you and Felix Hessen were friends?’

An old face embossed with rheumy yellow eyes rose to look at her. Then smiled. A clawed hand came to rest on her knee, below the hem of her skirt. ‘Yes, dear. A long time ago.’ The dry pads of her fingers moved in little circles on the fabric of her stocking.

‘I’m sure you get asked about him all the time. My great-aunt knew him too.’

The frail hand moved from her knee to wave about in the air. ‘I’ve told you before, it all changed after the accident. It was never the same again. Of course, once there were the puppets and everything else like that. He showed us at the, the, the. ’

‘Mews studio. Chelsea,’ Harold prompted.

‘Where are you, dear?’

Harold leant down. ‘Here Alice. Right next to you.’

‘Who is the lady with the pretty legs, darling? Doesn’t she have pretty legs.’

Harold chuckled. ‘I think so too.’ The fingers strengthened their hold on Apryl’s shoulder. She lacked the strength to swallow.

‘This is Apryl. A friend of ours, Alice. A friend. Tell her about Felix.’

Alice sighed. ‘Such a beautiful face. To lose it like that. We all thought him so handsome. And he painted the most wonderful puppets. Not for children, dear. No. Puppets in boxes. Stuck inside things, you know. But their faces you never forgot. I still see them.’

‘It can be hard to follow, especially the dates,’ Harold whispered, his mephitic breath hot against the left side of her face. ‘But sometimes what she says is extraordinary. I have no doubt at all that she knew Hessen. She was his model. One of the few he used.’

Apryl coughed and writhed inside her own skin under the onslaught of Harold’s breath. She tried to pull away but could get no further than the brim of Alice’s hat.

‘And the dancing,’ Alice said, suddenly, her eyes widening. ‘Oh, the dancing and chanting. You know. The most wonderful dancing. At his flat. Backwards dancing. Under the pictures, you know. Oh, the times we had.’ Alice leaned towards Apryl’s ear. ‘But it all stopped when they took him away. They were so cruel to him. It was terrible, dear.’

Squinting against the smell of Harold’s breath that was virtually being panted across her face, Apryl leant down closer to Alice. ‘His flat? Where did you dance? At Barrington House? Was that when you saw the puppets?’

But Alice was oblivious. ‘No, no, no. All rubbish, he used to say. All rubbish. It’s not the figures, it’s the background that counts. The stuff behind it you can’t see. Very clever man. Of course he was right. He tried to help us to see it too. I used to take my clothes off for him, dear. But clever men have bad tempers. And they were all against him in the end, dear. He showed them so much, but they never appreciated him. They were afraid of him. But you just had to trust Felix. He was an artist. One must accommodate such. They’d all seen the pictures. No one had seen anything like it before. And the walls, dear. It’s a part of it all, you know. All joined, you see. The background.’

What with Harold’s continued exhalations behind her neck, Alice’s disconnected thoughts, the effect of the Merlot she drank too quickly on account of her nerves, and the hot air saturated with the smell of incense and neglect, Apryl began to feel faint. She had to stand up. ‘Harold, please. I’d like to get up. Please. May I? Thank you, Alice,’ Apryl said, feeling an even greater need than ever to get away from Harold and the confused lady, whose recollections were next to useless.

Harriet’s round face appeared behind Harold. ‘The talk is about to start. Quick.’

Apryl stood at the rear of the crowd in the living room, not far from the front door, as Harold introduced a wizened creature in a shabby brown suit: Doctor Otto Herndl from Heidelberg. The doctor was the author of a small-press anthology of essays called Gathered on the Right, and the editor of some occult journal she missed the name of when the elderly man in front of her was racked by a coughing fit.

Otto Herndl began by saying something about the early philosophical influences on the precocious teenage Hessen. ‘Particularly Professor Zollner, who asserted the existence of a fourth dimension, and used the paranormal phenomena of the time as proof.’

While he struggled to translate his thoughts into English, Apryl was distracted by the man’s oddball appearance. The broken zipper of his trousers. A tatty briefcase resting against one scuffed shoe. His hair was razored up the back and sides of his head to a grey copse on top, then combed into a severe side parting. And he managed to convey the impression of being unsteady on his feet and about to topple over, without ever doing so. His brown, excitable eyes moved frantically behind his thick round glasses and his hands hovered out in front of him, as if strings had been attached to his wrists and were lazily controlled from above. It appeared he hadn’t shaved for days.

When he began to talk about ‘Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth’s five volumes of Genesis, a white supremacist treatise on eroticism, Bacchanalia, sexology and libido’, she lost the thread of his argument and her thoughts wandered back and forth, in and out of the lecture, and settled on comparing his ideas about Hessen with what she’d learned from reading Miles’s book.

She’d read how the young Hessen had been obsessed by Wotanism, the pagan cults and the millenarian sects of nineteenth-century Austria and Germany – racist mystical ideas that influenced Germany’s ideas of nationality between the wars. Hessen seemed to have approached it with the same passion modern kids follow rock or rap music. But Miles had been baffled as to how it had informed Hessen’s studies of cadavers, his grotesque primitivist sketches of animal-human hybrids, and his ghastly puppet triptych of the 1930s. That interest, surely, must have come from his schooling in medicine.

But Herndl insisted that Hessen’s sketches represented ‘a middle-class reaction to the industrialization of Europe’. They showed, he claimed, how he was predicting both the bovine passivity in urban man and the loss of control and will ‘zat ve see around us today’.

That contradicted what Miles had written. According to him, Hessen eventually mocked his own youthful interests in remote and rare folk movements, and acknowledged that they marked a young outsider’s flight from mainstream culture. As did his dabbling with orientalism, hypnotism, and fascism. They were all part of his detachment and alienation from the status quo, a terrible force that he saw as the antithesis of original creativity. And as Miles had pointed out, Hessen’s drawings reflected nothing of Nazi neo-classicism, or Aryan folk art. There was nothing idealistic or mythical in his art. It drew deeply from a complicated but brilliant imagination. Or whatever it was he saw in the shadows, or looking out from the murky windows of abandoned basements.

Miles Butler believed Hessen’s disappointment with the Nazis and their nationalist occultism, after travelling to Berlin, was colossal. He’d pursued one subculture too far and hated the reality up close. Hessen never understood anti-Semitism, and Vortex championed Hebrew mysticism.

His failure in Germany and then his imprisonment signalled his final withdrawal from society, its ideas and purposes. But despite the inconvenience of prison, Miles suspected that everything he’d experimented with until 1938 was mere preparation for the Vortex. It was the source not only of his inspiration, but of nightmares, melancholia and despair too: ‘the society of tragedy’, Hessen called it in volume 4 of Vortex, which was entitled ‘A World Behind This World’.

For her to be able to contradict Otto Herndl in this way, Apryl realized with horror, meant she’d remembered far too much about the man who’d cast such a spell over her great-aunt. The painter was fast turning into an unhealthy compulsion. She could even vividly recall what Hessen had written about the Vortex, because it seemed uncomfortably relevant to what Lillian had recorded.

I just want to dip my face into it. Now and again. And to paint what I see down there. But sometimes it shows itself to me: coming through the walls, or inside a laughing mouth, behind a vacant stare, or gathering itself in a wretched place. Either I am getting closer to it, or it is drawing nearer to me. Sometimes I can feel its breath on my neck. And my sleep is filled with it. Though my conscious mind banishes it, as if it has an in-built resistance to such things. But it is always there. Waiting. When I look over my shoulder, or walk past a mirror quickly and absently, I see it. Or when I slip into a torpor, it will creep into the room like a strange dark animal looking for food.

After an hour and fifteen minutes of the lecture Apryl sat on the dirty floor, behind a sofa. While Herndl barked out the names of summoning rituals Hessen had purchased from Crowley and had performed ‘with abzolute success’, her head spun. Fatigued by the heat, the nervous excitement, and the thin, dirty air of the city, when she heard the smattering of applause and a final cessation in the bewildering broken-English monologue of the speaker, she rose to her feet to leave. But Harold was upon her before she could find her coat.

‘Leaving so soon? No, you can’t – we haven’t had our little chat about your great-aunt yet. And if you go now you’ll miss the best part – the interpretations. Or, as we like to call them, the ‘study of dreamers in a room’. You see, the Friends share their connection to Hessen’s vision through a recounting of their dreams experienced under the influence of his art. We all try and find the missing paintings via trance. People resort to all sorts of means to get within the presence of the Vortex.’

‘Really? Amazing.’ Apryl barely had the energy to speak. ‘I must get on. I have plans for dinner.’

Harold wasn’t listening. ‘You’ll see why it’s so important.’

At the front of the room, as soon as Harold called for order, a forest of tatty arms shot into the air to begin the procedure. The music was turned off. The chatter died. A shabby-looking man wearing an overcoat, and with a white chinless face and bulging eyes, was the first to take the floor. ‘I returned to the same place twice. Lit up, but not with natural light.’

There was a murmur of acknowledgement. Or was it unrest?

‘And in the gases, that were yellow, I saw the clothed face again. A tall figure briefly walked forward, at me, with its face covered in red. Then it stopped and seemed to be suddenly some distance away from me. It repeated the movement several times. Then I woke up and thought I was having a heart attack.’

Before he could continue, Harold pointed to one of the young men wearing cavalry boots and a trench coat.

‘I was in my front room fasting and had deprived myself of any visual stimulation but the Puppet Triptych IV for two days and two nights. And when I slept, I glimpsed figures about a fire. Stick figures. Some of them fell in.’

There was a great impatience in the room. They weren’t exactly dismissive of each other’s dreams or hallucinations or visions or whatever they were, but each clearly felt his or her own to be more significant.

‘. I saw hateful faces. Black and red with rage.’

‘. they looked like clowns in dirty pyjamas.’

‘. two women and one man, dressed in an Edwardian fashion. But they had no flesh on their bones. I couldn’t wake up or run from the two women, who were unfurling the nets from the front of their bonnets.’

‘. crouching on all fours, in the corner of a basement. The walls were wet, made from brick.’

Thirsty, Apryl gulped at a second glass of wine. It was a mistake. She hadn’t eaten and felt light-headed. They were all jabbering out disjointed fragments of nightmares that had punched them from sleep and into the dreary alienation of their lives. What was the point of it all? Of them? The close stale air and the woollen heat and the crazy surrealist ranting of the guests made her move once again for the door.

‘. teeth like an ape. Eyes completely red. But no legs. Just dragging itself about in the sawdust.’

‘. The whole city was blackened by fire. Ash and dust in piles. But freezing cold. No sign of life—’ The gentleman wearing a cloth cap that shadowed a purple face was suddenly interrupted by Alice.

‘And they’re all about my bed!’ she wailed. ‘They come out of the walls, you see! No use in talking to them. They’re not there for that.’

‘I object to this!’ the figure in the cloth cap roared. ‘Must she always interrupt?’

Other voices murmured their assent. Harold appealed for calm. ‘Now, now, if you please. There is time—’

But Alice was not to be stopped. ‘Swirling up, all around, with backwards noises. Up in the corners of the rooms. I saw them once before the war and they never leave you.’

Irritated, the crowd began to chatter.

Harold leant towards Alice, a tense smile on his face while his eyes flitted about looking for the dissenters in the crowd. ‘Alice, my dear, we agreed you should talk last. The others must be allowed to have their say too.’

The man who had stared at Apryl’s legs and offered to take her to the Hessen pubs elbowed his way towards her. His fat face was shiny with sweat and it grinned lecherously. ‘I wouldn’t bother with this lot again,’ he said. ‘You should come and see us. The Scholars of Felix Hessen. Not so dreamy. This is a circus.’ His fat fingers rustled inside a leather satchel that hung from one shoulder. He produced a flyer and pushed it at her. ‘On the hush hush, we’re breaking away. This lot won’t get anywhere. Harriet’s too wishy-washy and Harold puts far too much faith in Alice. She’s as mad as a snake.’ He laughed, unpleasantly.

On the other side of the room Alice had begun to sing ‘Roll out the barrel’ in a childlike voice. Others had begun to shout over her. Through the chaos Apryl caught sight of the little figure of Otto Herndl. His grin was wide but his eyes were full of confusion. He seemed even more unsteady on his feet, as if someone had finally severed the strings.

‘I really don’t think so,’ Apryl told the leader of the splinter group. She struggled into her coat.

‘Can I see you again?’ he said.

‘I, I shan’t be in London for much longer. I’m very busy.’ But in the din she wasn’t sure he had heard her. She turned and pushed her way to the door.

Outside, the cold air rushed in to stifle her. It seemed unnaturally dark by the tower blocks and on the main road the traffic was relentless and moving too fast. She headed towards the lit-up area, to the centre of Camden Town. She wanted to get into a normal environment with normal people, and began walking away from the unlit buildings and ugly cafes, the empty fast-food restaurants and decrepit sunken pubs.

The meeting had depressed her. She’d expected the Friends to be eccentric after reading bits of their obscure website, but this fancy-dress party with its internal politics, splinter groups, and ludicrous claims of mystical dream connections struck her as adolescent. It was all fantasy. A gaggle of misfits attaching themselves to an artist who they imagined was a representation of their own alienation. They did nothing for Hessen’s reputation, while masquerading as guardians of his legacy.

Apryl huddled deeper into her scarf and pulled the collar of her coat up, but it was as if a residue of the meeting’s surreal dysfunction still clung to her. And pulled things in.

A junkie with a dirty whitish blanket across his shoulders ran across the road at her, narrowly avoiding two cars that sounded their horns. The violence of the sudden sharp sounds startled her. She held her breath, and then felt her skin ice with fear at the approach of the beggar. His thin, ashen face was scarred with purple lumps. A scrawny woman wearing a white baseball cap waited for him on the opposite side of the road, holding a can of beer.

‘Can you spare us firty pee for a cuppa tea? Just to keep warm, like.’

She hadn’t anything smaller than a ten-pound note. Apryl shook her head without looking at the beggar and increased her pace. He didn’t follow, but she heard a long sigh of disappointment and frustration before he said, ‘Oh fucking hell.’ It wasn’t directed at her, but at the cold, relentless misery of his life. At the dirty streets, the grey ugly council housing, the bent iron railings and the dying black grass, only lit up in part by the thin orange light of the street lamps that shrunk in the dense absorbing shadows all around the edges of anything solid.

The people here didn’t need to dream of such terrible things. They lived among them.