Mephistopheles
My worthy Sir, you view affairs
Like other people, I’m afraid;
But we, more cunning in our cares,
Must take our joys before they fade.
– Goethe, Faust I
* ¢
John Smith had never been in a chauffeur driven limousine before. After yesterday’s phone call from Eric Hayle’s people, he had been expecting a car to collect him but it was something of a surprise when he answered the door to a uniformed driver. Looking past the driver, he saw the elegantly elongated Mercedes Benz parked in the road, its darkened glass making it look very glamorous. He followed the driver down the stairs and exultantly let him open the rear door for him. He hoped his neighbours could see him. He climbed in and made himself comfortable.
From the moment the door closed behind him it was obvious that this was Eric Hayle’s personal limo. The floor of limousine was luxuriously carpeted in magazines. Thousands of them, strewn everywhere to such an extent that John could not see the carpet itself. It appeared that all the titles in Eric’s stables were here from women’s weekly gossip sheets to brash and flashy lad’s mags. Pushing through them with his foot, John estimated that the carpet was four or five editions deep.
Among the more eye-catching were a fair number of more lurid fare from Eric’s adult empire. And with a little digging John discovered a variety to these, from fairly tame tits and ass to things which (once he had looked close enough) John was sure were not legal in England and even some which did not seem anatomically possible.
This didn’t seem out of line with what John knew about Eric Hayle and his business interests. He was most famous as a pornographer who could make the devil blush. Eric had originally built his fortune on the sort of filth John’s feet were now resting on. Starting out as smut peddler in pre-war Soho and gradually extending his influence out from under these grimy counters into the more legal realms of the top shelves. From here he had built a more respectable career as the publisher of numerous other lower shelf magazines and for the last forty years he had also been the owner and proprietor of a national newspaper. A sleazy tabloid called The Clarion. As might have been expected it was a sensationalist and scurrilous scandal sheet.
Its stock in trade was the lurid sex and/or drugs scandal. But unlike its competitors it did not cover them with furtive and prurient mock-outrage. Preferring instead to condemn the lies and excuses more than the actual transgressions, which would be a little hypocritical given the Bacchanalian appetites of Eric himself. For that reason Eric went much more after politicians and media personalities than pop stars and footballers but he did not discriminate. Anyone who was newsworthy was newsworthy, and just as often Eric used it to pursue personal vendettas and persecute anyone who he felt deserved persecution. Nonetheless, The Clarion was very liberal politically, had been opposed to racism and sexism longer than any other paper on Fleet Street. (Which annoyed the feminist anti-pornography campaigners no end.)
He did not like religion and he did not like hypocrisy. It was rumoured that he had thrown one employee off the top of a tall building for printing an obsequious obituary of the fascist-appeasing Pope Pius XII. Like most rumours, it was the sort of scurrilous story put about by ones enemies that has just enough credibility to make people think twice. It was slightly more believable than the embellishment that he had first hit the poor man three times on the head with a golden hammer. Certainly, his editor at the time had fallen from a tall building and while not many people really believed Eric had pushed him, they all agreed that he had a very hands-on management style.
The man himself was fabled to be indestructible; more impervious to drugs than Keith Richards, more thirsty than Oliver Reed and with a bigger libido than an Italian football team. It was rumoured, that, in World War II, he had been some sort of double or triple agent. No one knew for certain not least because Eric had started most of the rumours himself. It was agreed that he had made enemies fairly evenly on all sides. But he had somehow managed to survive them all.
Survival came naturally to Eric. Currently into his tenth decade of life, he showed no signs of slowing down. He still kept a very firm grip on his business interests and partied just as hard as always. Nor was he getting left behind the times. Seven years previously he had been quick to adapt to the Internet age, moving a large part of his adult empire online and in the process becoming the world’s oldest dot com millionaire.
John was impressed that Hayle had sent his own personal car and driver. There was enough space to seat at lest eight people, and you could accommodate a baker’s dozen if a few were prepared to sit in each others laps. (Given who owned this car, it was not outside the realm of possibility, John reflected.) At the driver’s end, the partition was built from a wall of LCD screens. They were all glowing brightly. Pulsing and flashing as the images continually changed. There was news, cartoons, scrolling stock prices, at least two separate computer screens and a soft-core porn channel. Leaning forward from his seat, John realised that the most boring programme was actually footage of him leaning forward from his seat. Looking about, he saw the camera in the upper left corner. There was another on the right and there were also a couple of mini-flood lights. These were not turned on at the moment, but he felt he could make a fairly good guess as to what they were there for.
It was only eleven in the morning but it was a day that he thought might go better with a stiff drink for breakfast. He located the inevitable minibar and poured himself a very large whiskey. He was pleased and impressed to find there was ice in the icebox. He leaned back in the plush seat and enjoyed the journey.
They pulled up outside an identi-kit corporate headquarters, or so Smith assumed because he had only ever been in one before and it had looked almost identical. He imagined they all looked like this. A brightly lit foyer with dull blue-grey carpeting, vivid green plants in large round brushed metal pots - real, but so perfect that they did a very good of convincing you they were fakes, just as the all the art along the grey walls was doing very expensive impressions of the kind of scribbles that proud parents stick to the fridge. At intervals, three or four huge black and chrome chairs congregated round low glass tables, looking superficially comfy but having been designed by some austere Scandinavian, anyone attempting to sit in one for more than a minute or two would discover they were all form and no function. Nothing gave away what the company actually did, and if it was not for the large black E H logo behind the receptionists stealth-bomber of a desk he could not have said this was even the right place. He did however wonder if our average multi-national always had such attractive receptionists.
After a few minutes of trying unsuccessfully make himself comfortable, it suddenly occurred to John that he had little idea why he was here. The phone call had said that Eric Hayle wanted to speak to him and would he come to the offices of the Clarion. Beyond that there was no explanation. John had asked but the assistant he was speaking to had pretty much indicated that she rarely knew Eric’s reasons and that on the whole it was better not to ask. And it was better not to be late, therefore she had arranged to send the car. But it was only now that he was here that John tried to figure out why he was here. He did not get far before he was interrupted by a very grumpy man.
Peter Nickles was the most aggressive and obnoxious editor on Fleet Street. The editor of the Clarion, he was the second most unpleasant man in the British newspaper business and one of the poshest by far. He had the appearance of an Oofy Prosser or a Gussie Fink-Nottle (I always forget which is which.) One of those frog-like faces with protruding eyes, a big flabby neck and no discernible chin, his skin has the unappealing pallor of the undead. Add to that the fact that he had black brilliantine hair, looking like a nylon wig, its springy volume combed into a left-parted helmet and that his pear-shaped frame, was contained in a black three piece chalk-stripe suit with a red silk tie. It was as if he was a caricature of himself.
For the editor of a national newspaper to be sent to collect a visitor that no one had heard of was unheard of. So Peter Nickles was not a happy man and he did nothing to hide this from John. Gruffly indicating that Smith should follow him, he turned back around and without saying a single word.
John followed in silence as they took the lift to the main newsroom floor. It was noisier and messier than John had imagined but also in contrast to the offices he had worked in, there did seem to be a great deal of work going on. Almost everyone they saw was busy with something; hurrying about with piles of paper, talking on phones or typing furiously. They approached the middle of the newsroom floor. Hayle did not have an office in this building. Whenever he came to work here, he would pick a place he fancied sitting and throw its occupier out. Any complaints were always met with the same refrain.
“You are a journalist, aren’t you? Go out and get me a fucking story.”
They approached the desk that the tall, white-haired proprietor of Eric Hayle Publishing had chosen today. Nickles stood silently behind Hayle. John chose to do the same. He saw that Hayle was engrossed in some computer game; looking closer it appeared to involve shooting Nazis. Eric was enjoying it immensely.
Thanks to his perpetual dissembling and unrelenting refusal to take himself seriously, it was unclear what exactly Eric had done in the war. Every time he was asked about it he gave a different answer, all of them vague, implausible, impossible or immoral. Any given answer was usually a combination of at least three of these. What was known was that for the first few years he continued to produce pornography and did very well out of the black market but that shortly after the battle of Britain he was ‘recruited’ by Gordon Fowles, head of the war office counter intelligence and propaganda unit.
Fowles himself was usually described a ‘bit of a character’: unorthodox, unpredictable and amazingly good at this job, running a department the main activities of which were lying, cheating, stealing and occasionally killing. He had an intense dislike of military men, politicians and civil servants. Every day people like this pestered him, so every day he had something to be angry about. That he was ultimately answerable to them made him even more angry. That he was undeniably one of them made him permanently apoplectic. Though even his closest friends speculated that he would still be angry, even absolved of all responsibility and rewarded with eternity in a heavenly paradise, though they wasted no time speculating how likely that was.
As much as possible, Fowles tried to staff his department with people as far removed from the traditional military or governmental types. And since they were in the middle of a war on nobody minded much because they had enough problems of their own. He recruited some of his best forgers, safecrackers and housebreakers from His Majesty’s Prisons rather than His Army, His Navy or His Civil Service.
Although Eric had never been to prison, he certainly operated on the wrong side of the law. Eric, as the author and publisher of some of the most depraved and debased pornography a man could hope to buy, was just the sort of chap Fowles liked to hire. Since being a Soho porn baron was also one of the most profitable lines a gangster could be in, it was often, quite literally, a cut-throat business. Given the fierce competition and the dubious nature of their work, successful smut peddlers go to great lengths to keep their identities hidden. Up until then, Eric was one of most successful, so when he turned up to the print-shop with all set to run off five hundred copies of his latest offence against decency, a charming tale of an extremely well-proportioned and disciplinarian headmaster of a girls boarding school, he was rather surprised to see a tall scowling man sitting on the press.
Fowles made Eric an offer that Eric was wise enough not to refuse. And he had spent the rest of the war in even murkier waters than he managed as a black marketeer. Eric enjoyed himself immensely and increased his wealth in the process. Whether he helped the war effort of any of the countries that employed him to do so is one of those hypothetical questions so beloved of historians that are in reality almost impossible to answer.
John Smith and Peter Nickles had stood behind Eric for ten seconds but there was no indication that he knew they were there. John watched, in fascination, as the famously aggressive editor of the Clarion stood meekly waiting for his boss to finish playing computer games.
“Eric?” Nickles eventually said with some trepidation in his voice. John decided to be even more afraid than he was a few minutes ago but congratulated himself on having had a drink on the way here.
Hayle ignored Nickles.
“Eric?”
“What the fuck do you want, nob-head?” Hayle said without turning round or slowing his slaughter of Nazi’s.
“John Smith is here.”
Still Hayle did not look round.
“Well bring him up here then, you dozy cunt.”
“He’s here.”
Eric Hayle glanced back and noticed Smith, standing meekly next to the second fiercest man on Fleet Street. He returned to his game, dispatched a few more of Hitler’s henchmen and pressed pause.
Eric stopped and leaned in leeringly close to John. “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes, er, I had a, er, whiskey in your car,” John offered timidly back, a tiny schoolboy whose headmaster was about to thrash him.
“Oh, right, okay.” Eric paused. “Come on let’s go, I hate these wankers.”
He swept them out of the offices, barking at a few terrified employees along the way. Back in the limousine he poured them both whiskeys, twice as large as John had awarded himself. Tennessee’s finest bourbon was splashed liberally about the back seat and John’s clothes as Eric added large handfuls of ice to glasses that were already essentially full.
“Wigmore Street, Dave. Chop, chop.”
“I own the rights to your... performance last Saturday. Did you know they videoed it?” Eric threw him a gold DVD, “Here, watch it, it’s good.”
“I am a major shareholder in the Covent Garden Comedy Club and so I did a deal with them to acquire the broadcast rights, you obviously have legal claim as the performer but..” He paused. “But I am getting ahead of myself. As I told you, I liked what you said. I related to it. I have lived my life like that. All of it. I feel the passing of time as intensely now as I ever did.”
“Did you know I’ve faced a firing squad? Twice? A German one and one of our own. The first time with the Germans, I didn’t believe they were going to do it. They were sophisticated, they were officious, when they sprung the firing squad set up on me, I figured it was all part of their interrogation technique and I hadn’t told them anything by that stage so I expected they would wait. Nonetheless, you do have a moment of doubt, you wonder if they are serious.”
“I was more scared when it was our chaps. There had been a slight misunderstanding about the nature of my work. War is a very confusing time, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing and everyone is suspicious of everyone-else, and even more people were suspicious of me, though I can’t think why. I was in the hands of the regular army; dull, unimaginative people who follow orders unquestioningly even unto their deaths. I was on several charges and they would not let me explain or get a message through to any of my friends in positions of influence. They were just sleepwalking. They did not want to think for themselves. They were sleep-marching me to my death. Turned out all right on that occasion but it got my heart racing for a while. Anyway, I am getting off the point.”
“I like what you said. I thought you were very effective when you were caught up in it. I saw you get through to the people in that audience. Your message is my message and I want to spread it. I am very rich and very successful so naturally most people despise me. That doesn’t bother me because I despise most people. But, maybe I am getting sentimental in my old age because I can’t help but think that if these clueless morons had a little more idea about their one chance at life they might do something with it rather than wasting it and we might all fucking better off as a result.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” John managed to interject.
“No, you have. And what’s more you can be quite persuasive. My trouble is that no one will listen to what I say precisely because it’s me saying it. But you are nobody and nobody knows you so they’ll pay attention if you tell them.”
“I doubt it. Like you said, I am nobody. I’m not famous. And it was only an accident that I came out with all that on Saturday anyway.”
“You are not famous yet. But that can change overnight. On November 21, 1963 no-one had heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
John spluttered through a mouthful of bourbon that went down the wrong way. “You’re not suggesting I shoot someone, are you?”
Eric paused as though he might be considering it. “No, though obviously if you did, you have got to think big. How about the Queen?” For a moment Eric was lost in reverie “No, at least not yet, that would get in the way of the message. Not that Oswald was the shooter but that’s beside the point. The point is that you can become famous in no time at all. Give me a month and you’ll be national front-page news and not just in the Clarion. Give me two months and you’ll be on the front pages in countries you’ve never even heard of.”
“And you are sure I don’t have to shoot anyone?”
“No. Just do the same as you did on Saturday and I’ll make the rest happen. Although there is one thing; just don’t tell any fucking jokes.” With this Eric climbed out of the car.
At first, John did not realise they had arrived. Not that he knew where they were going but they had only been in the limo a few minutes. From Fleet Street they had turned up the Kingsway and at Holborn they had turned towards Oxford Street. But rather than negotiate its buses, taxis and reckless pedestrians, the driver was double-barrelling along the back streets. They were proceeding at speed slightly to the north and mostly parallel to Oxford Street. John had just seen a street sign telling him they had passed Harley Street and was thinking that he had never known where it was before now. If he ever needed to find it again he knew it was very near to wherever Eric was taking them because seconds later they had stopped and Eric was already climbing out of the vehicle.
They had stopped about half way along Wigmore Street, your everyday central London street, the buildings showing a wide lack of variety, each nondescript office building housing the unremarkable offices of lots of unremarkable little businesses. At street level a few Italian sandwich shops sold short-order lunches to all the financial advisers, market researchers and accountants, who liked to eat quickly before rushing back to their advising, researching and counting. And to all the quacks who popped round the corner from Harley Street between lucrative appointments. A couple of pizza restaurants and basement wine bars catered for the more leisurely lunches of bosses, secretaries and those with fewer work ethics. The same wine bar provided many a measure of after work relaxation and hosted all the special office occasions; Ian from sales’ leaving do, Dominic joining from the Watford office, Judith on reception’s birthday (age unspecified), Simon and Aileen’s engagement (Karen being notably absent).
The street was also home to a number of unlikely upmarket specialist shops; a kitchen shop that only sold Japanese sushi knives and outrageously expensive copper pans (£42.95 for a coddling pot), a shop selling bathroom lighting, a music shop that only stocked choral music and recordings of organ recitals, and most perplexing of all a chandler, a saddler and a bagpipe makers, all next door to each other.
The car had stopped about half way along the street outside a Chinese dentist. Eric had got straight out and was crossing the road toward an old building that might have been a municipal library or a registry office. John could not think why they had come here, but confusion was a state he was becoming accustomed to, so he followed Eric anyway. Crossing the street, he looked for clues as to where they had come. The building Eric was heading for was most likely a couple of hundred years old, a large stone-built structure with strong Gothic verticals but only simple ornamentation, built before the Gothic revival ran rococo out of control. The stone was blackened by soot but this added more an air of neglect than menace.
Eric was already at the top of a set of eight wide stone steps that lead up to the solid double doors. They were almost twice his height and he had to turn and lean into one to get it open.
The building was only two storeys high with another smaller floor tucked into the eaves, its attic windows peeping out over a sturdy parapet. However, such was the scale of the place that this was level with the fifth floor of the building next door. This was due in part to the raised ground floor but more because in the grand and expansive style of the building, both the first and second storeys were at least double the height of the pragmatic modern building next door. Clearly the prosperity of London two hundred years ago had something to do with this. As the centre of world commerce and the biggest beneficiary of the industrial revolution, its architects were clearly required to make everything in giant size. Doors twice as tall as people and rooms proportioned to match.
John had crossed the street and now saw beside the door Eric was holding open a mottled and tarnished brass plaque that somewhat improbably and highly worryingly declared that this was ‘Saint Helena’s School for Girls.’
•
The man had not liked school. At aged eleven he had been sent away to boarding school because his mother could not cope with both him and her alcoholism. His father could not cope with personal relationships or anything that involved people showing their emotions. So he had solved half his problem by sending the boy away to school for someone else to look after him and ignored the other half by staying late at work while his wife nursed her demons.
The teachers, the housemaster and the matron were all kind and understanding of the boy but his fellow schoolboys were evil in the unceasing but unthinking way of childlike innocence. (Whoever it was who coined that phrase was never the slightly odd new boy or girl at an English boarding school. If he or she had been, she or he might have been a little less inclined to suffer the bastards.) The man was that boy.
He was an average scholar. He was bad at playing every sport they forced him to try and was not interested in following religiously any teams of professionals doing the same thing. He was prone to daydreaming in class, which infuriated his teachers, and when reminded where he was, the boy inclined to make unusual and off the wall statements that served to remind his peers to be unkind (because he was different). He had unfashionable enthusiasms. He liked trains and buses. He preferred chess to television. He could replay in his head all the games of the Fischer-Spassky match but he could not recite a single Monty Python sketch.
He was not actively bullied in the way that is traditionally described in tales of dormitory derring-do and dastardliness. No breathless wheezes like the ultimately harmless apple-pie bed and head down the lavatory. Children are more sophisticated, insidious and damaging than that.
Yes, there were physical attacks. Times when taunted to snapping point the boy hit out and was hit back, always coming out worse. Which was of course the aim of all those dead arms, wedgies and dead legs. Beatings without bruises that left him with no option of co-opting teacher intervention and left him stranded or maddened into unilateral lashing out, landing him in more trouble than sullen, aching silence.
But that was just boys being boys, far worse is when little boys (and little girls) turn to the psychological warfare. It is not the full flush of head held in a water closet that makes them crack. It is the gentle yet unrelenting tap, tap, tap of a Chinese water torture that gets results. A whispering campaign, death by a thousand cutting remarks, the intended victim always reminded that he or she was not their friend. There is no escape and no one to turn to.
The unpopular children cannot band together because the strength in numbers always comes on the side of the strong. They will set you against each other. You could go along with it in the hope of acceptance but they will always reject you in the end. Far better for oddballs to walk alone, each taking his turn as the figure of fun, unable to understand the inhumanity meted out to those to march to the beat of a different drum.
The housemaster had noticed that the boy was unpopular but there was not a great deal he could do. Any intervention would make things worse. Whatever lecture he delivered the boy would have to live with its ignorant interpretation once he was gone from the room. He knew the others did not need another reason to dislike the boy. So for twenty-four hours a day, the boy had no privacy and no escape.
The only time he felt anything approaching happiness was in the school chapel. The one thing he could do well was sing and the one place no one could make jokes at his expense was in the serious atmosphere of a service. Once he had joined the choir, he was in chapel and in rehearsals more than almost anywhere else. The highly ostensible religious attitude that the headmaster encouraged in his school was a probably less a deeply held moral imperative and more a calculated act of brand management, designed to keep this middle ranking public school saleable in the competitive world of private education. Either way it meant that being a chorister was an official badge of recognition and the commitment of the choristers was taken very seriously. The boy was a good singer and there was nowhere else he would rather be than the safety of the choir stalls so his attendance was impeccable. His termly singing report was the only one where his praises were sung.
He settled down into a defensive existence, not fitting in but surviving. He could not have fitted in, even if he had wanted to. It was the way his brain was wired, he would always be a lone gunman. And anyway, after two years of torment, he did not want to fit in.
At the age of thirteen, the scope of his concentration widened. He still obsessed about public transport and chess, but now in class he found he could now stop daydreaming long enough to pay attention. His marks improved and his report began to talk of previously unnoticed potential. In chapel too, the boy started paying attention, he noticed the words of the hymns he was singing and then his interest awakened he finally heard the words of the interminable sermons. It was Good News. He got religion.
It did not directly help his cause with his classmates. To them, the Cross was just another stick to beat him with. But now that he had seen the Light, he had a new way of coping, his own cross to bear.
* ¢
Praying this was not what it looked like, John followed Eric through the front doors of Saint Helena’s School for Girls. The entrance hall was much as he expected a posh girls’ school to look. High up the walls, the hallway was hung with varnished plaques listing over fifty years of head-girls, scholars and captains of the 1st XI dating back to the 1890’s. Between these a number of stern, stiff backed Old Maids peered down from dark oil paintings. Former headmistresses, he guessed. He could imagine the vaulted hallway echoing to the sound of dozens of girls giggling and clattering their hockey sticks on the black and white tiled floor as they rushed to morning service. And sure enough the steps of the curving marble staircase were worn down as if by generations of hurrying feet.
Presently, however, the hallway was empty. The lights had been off before they entered and Eric was currently disabling some alarm system. John began to suspect that this was no longer a school for girls. The last entries on the boards of head-girls and scholars were from the 1950’s and on inspection closer he realised that the artistic black and white photographs hung on the lower walls were celebrating the Sapphic tradition a little too exuberantly for even a British girls’ boarding school. However, the thing that clinched it was the large statue in the alcove formed by the curving staircase. While John knew these posh schools valued a classical education, he very doubted that any a girls school would have such a large and detailed marble statue of Leda and the Swan. This, it seemed, was Eric’s house.
A large closed door leading off to the right was still marked as the Headmistress’s office. Another to the left declared that it led to a library and it was in this direction that Eric now headed. John trailed along.
The library itself had more of Eric’s personality imposed upon it. A huge, double-height room about the size of a tennis court, it was filled with a cacophony of incongruous and inappropriate items. It still retained some semblance of a library. Oak bookshelves still covered most of the walls, particularly the upper level accessed from spiral staircases in opposite corners of the room. The shelves on this level ran round all four walls and were almost all filled with books and magazines. On the lower level, however, Eric’s life had taken over. This was the main room of his house. He used it as an office, a studio, a bedroom and much more besides. On most of these shelves the books competed for space with an unclassifiable range of dubious looking items; small obscene figurines, large phalluses and other sex aids both ancient and modern, macabre Victorian medical curiosities pickled in formaldehyde and a few more innocent bits of modern art.
Along one of the shorter walls, the bookcases had been ripped out and replaced with a hi-tech zoo of plasma TV’s, Hi-Fis, computer screens and other expensive looking electronic gadgetry. Beside this was a fully stocked zinc-t