The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(162)

‘I must apologize for this brandy,’ I said, flicking a glance at Johanna. ‘For my part I believe I’d rather have some of that Pastis stuff: could you face it? I daresay there’s some in the house …?’

A few gollups of Pastis later (it’s really just absinthe without the wormwood) he was relaxed and expansive.

‘Do you promise not to laugh?’ were his first words.

We crossed our hearts.

‘Well, two years ago I read a book by a man called Konstantin Raudive. It’s a perfectly respectable book and endorsed by respectable scientists. Raudive claims, indeed proves, that he heard gentle chattering and muttering coming from the unused intervals of tape from his recorder. I had had the same experience but had put it down to the random wireless reception …er, radio?’

‘Wireless is fine with me,’ I said.

‘Oh, good. Well, as I say, I had thought it was the sort of stray reception that people get from hearing-aids and things but after reading Raudive I naturally tested it and found that even on virgin tape I still got the gentle muttering if it was played through on “record” in silence and at a nil recording level. Like Raudive, I found that if I boosted the gain when playing-back it sounded uncommonly like speech, but with quite strange intonations, odd grammatical sequences, random relevance.’

Johanna rose, excused herself gracefully and said that she really had to go to bed. She hates long words, although she is very clever. (Why do I persist in entangling myself with clever women when the only ones I find truly adorable are the transcendentally stupid, the ones whose intellects are bounded on the North by the ability to count to nine? Alas, the latter get rarer every day. ‘Il y a des gens qui rougissent d’avoir aimé une femme, le jour qu’ils aper?oivent qu’elle est bête. Ceux-la sont des aliborons vaniteux, faits pour brouter les chardons les plus impurs de la création, ou les faveurs d’un bas-bleu. La bêtise est souvent I’ornement de la beauté; c’est elle qui donne aux yeux cette limpidité morne des étangs noiratres et ce calme huileux des mers tropicales.’ I forget who wrote that. Probably not Simone Weil.)

‘Do go on, Fr Tichborne,’ I said when the good nights were over.

‘I say, would you care to drop the “Fr” now?’ he asked. ‘The boys at school call me “Eric” – I can’t imagine why, for it’s not my name, but I quite like it.’

‘Please go on, Eric. And pray call me “Charlie”.’

‘Thank you. Well, once I got the hang of these odd attempts at communication, I found them quite, well …’

‘Mm?’

‘Interesting,’ he said defiantly. ‘Interesting!’

Trying, as ever, like Caesar’s wife, to be all things to all men, I tried to help.

‘But disturbing?’ I guessed.

‘Yes, that too. Certainly that. Disturbing is a good word. You see, I began to recognize voices and to unscramble them and they were all from dead chaps, you see, like my old headmaster and the Principal of my Seminary and people whose books I had read – well, of course I couldn’t recognize their voices but if you hear a chap talking really barbarous Latin with a strong Slav accent and telling you not to wash because it’s a sin of fleshly luxury and then he says his name is Jerome, what can you think?’

‘What indeed?’

‘Quite. But I felt that I had to go on taping and listening and trying to hear and understand and it got worse.’

I slid some more Pastis into his glass, added a little water and helped him aim it at his mouth. He wasn’t drunk, I think he was in some sort of private ecstasy, like a menopausal woman thinking about Cassius Clay.

‘It got worse?’ I prompted.

‘Much worse. Cardinal Manning shouted and shouted at me and seemed to know all about my, er, case; and then someone calling himself Pio Nono kept on saying that he would pray for me but that he couldn’t promise anything and then, worst of all …’ His voice broke.

‘Your mother?’ I asked gently.

‘Oh, no, she’s always very understanding. It was St Francis. At first I hoped it was Francis of Assisi but he soon put me right: it was St Francis Xavier. He was horrid to me. Horrid. You can have no idea what that old bastard can be like.’

His eyes were full of tears. Well, of course, I know what to do with drunken nut-cases. You humour them, listen to them, get them really pissed, then put them to bed, first loosening their collars and removing their boots. My only pre-occupation was how to loosen a Roman collar and how to prevent Eric from moistening my landlord’s rather good Empire sofa.

‘Look,’ he said suddenly and articulating clearly, ‘would you like to hear? Please?’

‘Certainly, certainly; I’ll go and fetch the tape-recorder. Tell you what, let me just freshen up your glass first.’

I fetched my rather good tape-recorder, broke open a new sixty-minute blank tape, fed it deftly into the machine and set it ready for action at 3?″ per second. Eric gazed at the machine in an ambivalent sort of way, as you or I might gaze at the dentist’s drill, which both giveth and taketh away pain. He went on gazing until I sort of shuffled and fidgeted. He looked up at me with a startling, seraphic smile.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have told you. All these phenomena seem to be linked to an alpha-rhythm in the brain of around eight to twelve cycles. It seems that people who can do telepathy and telekinesis and thing like that are people who can more or less organize their alpha-waves. Sometimes it can be induced by hypnosis, sometimes it just occurs naturally when one is falling asleep or in a half-aware condition when awakened from sleep too soon; adolescents and menopausal women can often induce it by thinking unclean thoughts with their eyes shut. Mediums who insist on half-darkness and silence and so forth during their parlour-séances are usually, if they’re at all genuine, fumbling for conditions in which they can depress their alpha-waves to the required level, whether they know it or not. I suspect that many “fake” mediums are women who are genuinely receptive at times but do not understand how to set up the conditions properly and so fudge the results when it doesn’t really work.’