What with Gran’s beady eyes and vitriolic tongue, it had taken him nearly six months to summon up the courage to ask Gemma out. Oh, but it was worth it. And the reason he found all these smells erotic was that one evening, hours after the shop had closed, he’d managed to persuade Gemma to go nearly all the way, on a pile of unredeemed coats.
It was five to eight; he ought to be taking his seat. A thin man with round spectacles appeared and guided him past the racks of clothes and up a rickety staircase. At the top was a small landing packed with people waiting to buy tickets. More people were coming up the stairs behind him. Since that basement in Agate Street he’d hated overcrowded spaces and might have left, only at that moment the couple in front moved on, and he was level with the table. A woman with mournful brown eyes was taking the money, attempting to look deeply spiritual while counting notes with the help of spit on a well-practiced thumb. He handed over a ten-shilling note, was given a ticket and asked to surrender his blackout torch.
“Why?”
She looked at him. “When the medium’s in a trance, her eyes are very sensitive to light.”
“But there’s hardly any light.” Blackout torches were notoriously dim.
Rolling the notes into a wad, she snapped an elastic band tight around them. “Very sensitive.” He gave her the torch.
The seance room was cramped and stuffy, lit only by three small, red-shaded lamps set at intervals along the far wall. An usher guided him to a seat near the back, though he noticed there was a whole row of vacant seats at the front. It was so dark he could hardly see to get to his seat and had to apologize constantly for trampling on people’s toes. When, finally, he was settled, he took a deep breath and looked around. Eight rows of chairs faced a stage on which stood some kind of cabinet, not unlike a nightwatchman’s box. Black curtains had been pulled back to reveal a wooden chair with arms. He noticed another chair near the front of the stage, which seemed to have black clothes draped over the back. The room was about two thirds full, and it was well past eight o’clock, but for a long time nothing happened, except whispers and coughing and more muttered apologies as late arrivals tripped over people’s feet. He could see slightly better now. In the third row, he noticed a middle-aged shelter warden, Angela Langdale, very jolly-hockey-sticks, but rather nice, with a lot of mousey-fair down on her upper lip and a genius for organization. When he was on patrol, he often called in at her shelter for a cup of tea and a cigarette. Next to her was Sandra Jobling. Now that was a surprise. He didn’t think of Sandra as the sort of person who went to seances, but then he didn’t think of himself as that sort of person either.
The thought of a cigarette, once planted, quickly blossomed into a craving, though when he looked around he saw that nobody else was smoking. Perhaps the organizers were so wedded to darkness that even the striking of a match seemed threatening? He tried to ignore the craving, but it wouldn’t go away, so he repeated the stumbling and apologizing, receiving in return some decidedly disgruntled looks.
Downstairs, he found the front door locked, but there’d be a back entrance and almost certainly a yard. He pushed between the racks of clothes, releasing a smell of mothballs which made him want to sneeze, and found himself in another much smaller room, hardly more than a passage really, with three doors opening off. The first door led into a broom cupboard containing an ironing board, a bucket and a mop. The next door opened onto a room where at last, at last, there was enough light to see by, though what he saw defied belief. He stood, rooted to the ground, jaw unhinged, gawping like an idiot.
Bertha Mason sat, naked, on a table, facing him, surrounded by three middle-aged women, all dressed in black, but he had eyes for nobody but her. The sheer size of her: chins, neck, breasts, belly — all pendulous — the sagging, wrinkled abdomen hanging so low it almost hid the fuzz of black hair beneath. Like a huge, white, half-melted candle she sat, eyes glazed, a fag end glued to her bottom lip. She made no move to cover herself, just sat there, breathing noisily through her open mouth. He stared, he couldn’t stop himself, until one of the women darted forward and slammed the door in his face.
Dazed, he opened the third door and blundered out into a small yard where he lit a cigarette, dragging smoke into his lungs like oxygen. What he felt was neither pity nor revulsion, but something altogether more complex. An image was taking shape in his mind: the Willendorf Venus. That featureless face beneath elaborately styled hair, vestigial arms, roll upon roll of fat, each roll resting on the one below, vestigial legs, no feet. But it’s not negative: she has no eyes because she contains the world; she has no feet because everything comes to her. It’s an image of power.
At least Bertha Mason had a face, though it had been completely blank. Was she in a trance? Had to be, something like that. He crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath his foot, taking his time, grinding it away to nothing, then went back upstairs to the crowded room, where a buzz of expectation was running along the rows.
His seat had been taken. The back rows were full so he crept down the aisle and took a seat on the end of the front row. Nobody challenged him, though he saw that all these seats were marked “Reserved.” Evidently only known supporters were allowed as close to the platform as this.
The lady of the ten-shilling notes mounted the stairs and announced in a markedly nasal voice that she would now invite a member of the audience—“chosen at random”—to step up and examine the medium’s clothes. The randomly chosen one, who’d been sitting in one of the reserved seats on the front row, shook the clothes, turned them inside out, ran her fingers ostentatiously along every seam, and then, with a brisk nod, handed them back. The garments were ceremoniously carried out and returned, shortly afterwards, with Mrs. Mason inside them, wheezing from the climb upstairs. Her breathing was so bad Paul was inclined to shout: Oh for God’s sake, stop messing about, call a doctor! She had to be helped onto the platform. Once there, she took a moment to get her breath, then entered the cabinet, where she lowered herself into the chair and let her head fall back, shortly afterwards emitting a succession of grunts and snorts as the curtains, with a great rattling of brass rings, were pulled across. Raggedly at first, then with more conviction, the audience began to sing “Abide with Me.”
Paul didn’t know what to expect. Fraud, yes, of course: only he’d thought it would be subtle. Skilled. What followed was fraud, all right, but blatant, crude, embarrassingly unconvincing fraud. He didn’t understand how anybody could possibly be taken in by it, but people were. One woman looked positively radiant as she recognized the face of her dead son, though, to Paul, the returning spirit was very obviously a papier-mâché head stuck on the end of a broomstick and draped in cheesecloth; cheesecloth which smelled strongly of fish.
Mrs. Mason had two spirit guides. The one who appeared most frequently, who acted as a kind of impresario, was Albert, who’d apparently seen service on the Western Front, and had passed over, as he put it, on the first day of the Somme. Albert’s voice was convincingly masculine; his public-school accent much less so. This was no more than a music-hall imitation of a toff and even that was starting to slip a bit. The other guide, who popped up from time to time, was a little girl of truly awful sweetness who would keep bursting into song: Shirley Temple, but without the talent. Paul was sickened by it. No, quite literally: he felt sick. Probably he should have walked out, but the memory of that naked figure, the wheeze of her labored breathing, held him back. Instead he closed his eyes, determined to detach himself from the proceedings.