3

The day of the owl had begun rather badly, with a visit from Hogan. Hogan was a client, one of Benson’s Fictioneers, but he was in a category of his own, not being a writer in primal impulse, not buoyed as the others were by a sense – however groundless – of vocation. Hogan had never thought of writing anything until his doctor suggested it; he had suffered a nervous break-down followed by clinical depression and the doctor, who took an interest in psychiatry, on discovering that Hogan liked reading, had suggested that he might try writing something. A form of therapy, in other words. Now while all creative activity is therapeutic in some degree, or so at least Benson believed – were not his own miseries a living proof of the converse? – he still did not feel quite easy in his mind about Hogan’s motivations.

This was the man who sat across from him now in the little room he used as an office, clean-shaven, blue-eyed, prematurely bald, briefcase in lap, dressed in his navy-blue suit and maroon tie – one of the several terrible things about Hogan was the drowning way he clung to appearances.

“What,” Benson said, “you are going back to your childhood now, are you?” He had been dismayed to learn of this further regression. “I thought we had decided to begin with the adolescent love-affair.” Every time they agreed on a beginning Hogan shifted the ground further back.

“I want to get back to my roots,” he said now.

“Let’s recapitulate, shall we?” Benson averted his gaze. He knew he had taken on something of a priest-like role with Hogan and it worried him. At the prospect of speech he felt his jaw start on its course of slight convulsions. “When you first started coming to see me,” he began, “you had your ideas quite formed, as I remember. An autobiographical novel it was to be, but concentrating on your experience of the last few years. It sounded promising. What has happened to you has made you a representative figure in a way, hasn’t it?”

He paused, aware, without needing to look, of the other’s expectancy, the slow blue eyes, the stiff face – nearly all mobility had left Hogan’s face since the break-down. He had plastered his hair with something, some lotion, so as to reduce the impression of baldness, and the sweetness of it hung in the air, troubling Benson, whose sense of smell had always been acute.

“Yes, well,” he said at last, sighing. “Here you have a man in his prime.” He wasn’t sure it did much good in the long run but he knew Hogan derived a sort of solace from hearing recounted, in exact sequence, the events that had wrecked his life. It had become a saga, translated into the third person. “In his thirties,” he said.

“Thirty-four.”

“Thirty-four years of age, married, two small children, just started buying his own house, in Crosby, in a nice part—”

“Semi-detached.”

“Semi-detached house in Crosby, well-paid job as an electrician in the shipyards.”

“Electrical engineer.”

“He bore in his own person the aims and aspirations of a generation.”

“He did so,” Hogan said, almost with animation.

“Then – stroke of the gods or as many would say owing to the brutal cost-cutting of a callous and shortsighted government, led by a woman who cannot hear the cries of the oppressed for the rattle of the cash-till, the yard is closed down on grounds of unprofitability, he becomes redundant, he can’t find another job anywhere on Merseyside, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, he gets into debt, his house is repossessed by the Building Society, his marriage falls apart, his wife divorces him and obtains custody of the children, he has a nervous break-down …” Benson paused for breath. “Have I left anything out? Now he is back in rented accommodation.”

“Sub-standard.”

“Sub-standard rented accommodation.”

“That is the truth of it,” Hogan said.

“The real truth would have been in the telling. But then you changed your mind. You said you wanted to go back to adolescence, to this love-affair with an older woman.”

“I wanted to go back a bit,” Hogan said. “Try to get back to my roots.” He protruded his tongue slightly, as if it were momentarily too big for his mouth.

“Well, it is a pity in some ways. Your first idea had elements of Greek drama about it. There you are, ensconced in your house in Crosby. Let’s say your wife is beside you on the sofa. Let’s say you are having a well-earned light ale. You are pleased with the progress of your children. You talk about piano lessons. You have got holiday brochures there on your lap. You make plans for a holiday on the Costa del Sol.”

“Costa Blanca.”

“Costa this, Costa that,” Benson said. “What about the costa to you? What about the costa to the bloody country? It’s time the accountants who rule us looked up from their balance sheets and started counting the human costas.”

This speech, which had sounded angry, was born of shame and compunction on Benson’s part. He had felt the blood rush to his face. Glibly making up a story, turning this shattered man into a stage figure, seeking to shape a loss too raw to be shaped. And my offensive assumption of familiarity. Taking over his intimate life for purposes of illustration. Why do I do it? No better than those who injured him. Far away, on another costa altogether, one that Hogan would never visit, people whose own jobs were not at risk had looked at columns of figures, met in committees, then proceeded to strip him of everything he possessed. Though not leaving the precincts of Westminster, though borne on no tide but bonhomie and Beaujolais, they had plundered Hogan just as surely as the Vikings, crossing the Irish Sea, had plundered his forebears a thousand years ago. The altars of Woden and Thor had been exchanged for those of more abstract gods, but for Hogan the result was much the same. Even his identity they had half wrenched from him. He was trying to hold it together with his briefcase, his navy-blue suit, his plastered, fragrant hair … Pity is not the answer, Benson thought. Pity is too easy. If I could summon rage, fire. He said, “You have been robbed, Michael, just as surely as—”

“Plenty of others besides me,” Hogan said. “There was the slump in oil prices, giving rise to a world recession. We are seeing the results of market forces operating on a worldwide scale. It’s a complicated matter. Not easy to understand at all.”

“That is their language,” Benson said. “You are using the phrases they use against you …” Abruptly he fell silent. He had seen what he ought to have seen before: Hogan would need to believe complex impersonal forces were responsible for his troubles, just as he would need to feel that large numbers of others were in the same boat. It helped him not to feel unworthy. It was the same assertion that he was seeking to make through the business suit and the briefcase. “You may be right,” Benson said. “Anyway, that was the first scenario, wasn’t it? Then you retreated from that. Your next idea was to go back twenty years or so, to your adolescence, to write about a love-affair with an older woman, ending in a return to your childhood sweetheart. Now, once again, you have slipped back. Now you tell me you are going back to childhood.”

Hogan had begun to fumble in his briefcase. “I’ve been doing some research,” he said. He took out what looked like a toilet roll, though the paper was of tougher texture. Unfurling about nine inches, he held it out at arm’s length.

Craning forward, Benson saw a red asterisk somewhere in the middle and a date, 1952, with born in brackets after it. Leftwards from this, antecedent to birth, were various entries in different coloured inks, green, black, red. There was the date of his parents’ marriage, in 1941. Below this, in a neat column, Hogan had written: Fall of Dunkirk. Bride wore white crêpe de chine. We stood alone. Blackout.

“You are going back further still I see,” Benson said, with a sense of foreboding. But Hogan had got up, bringing the interview to an end; he had merely wanted to demonstrate his industry. Before leaving he dug out of the briefcase a battered-looking volume, which he handed over with his nearest approach to a smile so far.

“What have you got for me this time?” Benson glanced at the title: Gems from Emerson. “Excellent,” he said. “Plenty to get the teeth into there.” As one of the long-term unemployed Hogan could not afford to pay for these sessions, but he seemed to have access to some obscure store of books; he brought along a selected volume every time. Benson kept a special shelf for them. When Hogan had gone, he added Gems from Emerson to such previous offerings as Gene Stratton-Porter’s Moths of the Limberlost, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and Volume 2 of the Memoirs of Lord Grey of Fallodon. He stood looking at them, arranging and rearranging the titles in his mind, trying to find a clue, discern a pattern. A few minutes of this was enough to make him feel slightly sick.

He drank some whisky as a restorative, made himself a sandwich of brown bread and tinned tuna, then went to sit at his desk for a while – he still continued to spend some part of the day at his desk, though the only result was more anguish of spirit.

Sitting there he tried to find reasons, he murmured over old disasters. Here, or here, some slow poison had been ingested, or some remote detonation was withering him now with its blast. Six years since the break-up of my marriage; three years since that fiasco with Fiona Greenepad; fifty-four years since my father beat me for playing with Lucy Ringer in the garden shed. Her knickers had a floral pattern, little pink roses. The sight of them purchased with pain. Everything has a price-tag, my father was fond of saying. I was nine years old. Warm, exciting, tarry smell … Creosote, the shed had just been given a coating of the stuff. Creosote is resistant, proof against time and weather. They poured creosote over the dead to keep the smell down. Was it the beating? Those spans of years, randomly recollected, were all multiples of three …

But nothing helped. His was a complex affliction; the sense of just how complex was coming near to destroying him. The causes squatted somewhere out of sight; perhaps not in his personal past at all, he sometimes thought, the delayed narcotic, the soundless bomb. Why should this block, this arresting stroke, have been visited on him rather than on another, and when it was too late to change course, too soon to give up? Why me, Clive Benson, a man with an early volume of poetry under his belt, plus a critical biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, well-received, and six novels on historical themes, of which the third had been made into a film by Paramount? I should have been reaping honours, not living drably and penuriously on dwindling royalties, eked out by my literary consultancy and odd jobs of journalism. But I wouldn’t care about poverty, he thought, if only I could work again.

Wearying at last, he got up, and then there suddenly came to him the notion of lighting a fire in the grate. This was something he had never done before, partly because the central heating worked after a fashion, mainly because tenants were clearly not expected to do it; the landlady, Mrs Dollinger, had blocked off the fireplace with a square of plywood painted white. But the day was dark and cold and he was despondent. He now saw too that by lighting a fire he would be sending a signal instead of endlessly seeking one; his fire could serve as a cry to the Muse. True, Grenville Street was far from her reputed haunts, his choked mind even farther; but a brave flame might do something.

The idea once conceived, Benson was immediately possessed by it. Rapidly he made his way down two flights of stairs, out the front door, round to the back of the house, where between brick walls the wasted grass awaited the stiffening of spring. Like me, like me. There were some remnants of privet at the far end and an ancient dwarf of an apple tree, bedraggled and full of woe. It was very cold.

In his approach he startled a blackbird, which shot off with accusatory clamour, swallowed instantly by the alerted silence. He began to grub for fallen twigs at the foot of the privet and had soon amassed quite a heap. He tugged at dead boughs on the apple tree and they broke off with sharp cracks. With each sound fed to it, he felt the silence grow more voracious. Amidst the detritus of former tenancies and the infestations of weed he found some mildewed sections of plank and these he set at an angle against the wall and stamped on savagely, splintering them into manageable pieces. He was breathing fast, exerting himself to a dangerous extent, impatient with brute matter, urged on by the trumpeting of his idea.

Intent on the job in hand, he had not heard any opening of a window, but then a voice called down to him, “Votter you up to?” Turning abruptly, looking upwards, he saw Mrs Dollinger leaning out of an attic window. She was regarding him intently, her narrow face framed by the dark-coloured headscarf she wore indoors and out; beyond her, the grey slate of the roof, which had a pallid gleam on it; beyond that, a darkening sky.

In the silence which followed this question – and it was the kind of question he liked least – Benson stood smiling, prey to his obsession, holding a piece of splintered plank. After some moments he made a gesture with this like a weak backhand at tennis. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Well, not a very good one, is it?”

“Veather is veather,” Mrs Dollinger said austerely. “I am asking votter you up to in this garden.”

“Garden?” He was surprised. “Well,” he said after a moment, “what are any of us up to, if it comes to that?”

He knew at once, from her silence and immobility, that this attempt to broaden the issue was not going to succeed. The thing not to do, of course, was tell the truth: she would veto the project instantly. On the other hand he felt that if he delayed much longer he would lose control of the situation altogether. Already the loneliness surrounding them both on this dark wintry afternoon had begun to disturb him. He felt sorry that life had placed her in an attic window, with a headscarf on, implacably interrogating people. We deserve better than this, he wanted to say. We both deserve better than this.

“Votter you up to, lighting a fire?” Mrs Dollinger said.

“Good Lord no. These are natural forms, objets trouvés, Mrs Dollinger, different textures of wood. I intend to take them up to my apartment and arrange them.”

He turned away from her and crouched and began to forage about, gathering up the spoils: plank first, then apple sticks, then privet twigs. He was hoping that if he took time over this she might withdraw, but no: when he faced round again, stacked with wood from chin to waist, Mrs Dollinger was still there.

“Well, here we go, cheerio.” She thinks me mad anyway, he thought; she thinks me an old, untidy lunatic. Besides, she can hardly call me a liar to my face. Balancing his burden with care, valiantly smiling, he began to move off towards the side of the house.

“Don’t you go lighting fires,” Mrs Dollinger called loudly after him. “We don’t allow it.”

Benson quickened his steps. In a moment he was round the corner out of her view. Regaining the apartment was awkward, thus encumbered; he left a trail of twigs; he had to unload everything on the landing before he could open his door. By this time he was feeling harassed but no less determined. He locked the door, once he had got the wood inside, in case Mrs Dollinger came to check up.

No shortage of paper in the apartment of Clive Benson. Stacks of old Guardians and Observers lay wilting in corners, in cupboards, at the bottom of his wardrobe, waiting to have items cut out of them and pasted in the current scrapbook. Just what items is the mystic choice of the scrapbook-keeper, through which he expresses his world view, his sense of the human condition. One of the results, or symptoms, of Benson’s malaise, was paralysis of the scissor hand – he could no longer see meaning in selection, in salvaging one thing rather than another from the welter of events. The papers had been there a long time.

The square of plywood came away without difficulty. The twigs were damp and would not catch at first; they hissed and smoked and some of the smoke came into the room instead of going up the chimney. On his haunches, eyes smarting, Benson passed hectic moments lighting spills of paper and thrusting them under the hissing pyramid. Then with joy he saw pale tendrils of flame clutch up at the twigs. He laid some of his trusty apple on top; the flames yearned upward to it and clambered, rosier, more nourished-looking, with ambitious throbs and sputterings of violet in their midst. There was a core of fire now; the warmth came out of it.

At this point, with this first warmth, the nature of the proceedings changed dramatically. So far, merely a deeply troubled man struggling to light a forbidden fire. But as he crouched there, wondering whether it was time to put a piece of plank on, he noticed something against the wall, just alongside the fireplace, something black. He shifted over, looked more closely: it was a big shiny beetle, on its back, delicate frail legs raised in a final submission that had not saved it. Benson took the creature gently between finger and thumb, laid it right way up on his palm. Death had been recent; the carapace was glossy still, peacock traces shifted in it with the movements of the flames. Had he brought it in with the sticks? Had it crawled out of some recess, perhaps just now, made its way to the fireplace and so died? But for a man as skilled in messages and meanings as Benson, the stages of the journey were irrelevant: to the place of fire it had come, and fugitive flame colours moved in its cape. Its presence changed everything. No mere wanton blaze, he thought. No desperate signal this, but devotional, sacrificial …

With movements ordered and measured he took a short length of plank, balanced it level across the edifice of fire, placed the beetle on it dead centre, legs in air as he had found it, as it had offered itself. The plank was half-rotten and resisted for a while, giving off quantities of acrid smoke, some of which came billowing into the room. But then the soft flames licked round it, curled over, enveloped it at last, and Benson, watching intently, saw the beetle surrender its matter in a jet of clear green.

“I invoke thee, O Muse,” he said aloud, still on his haunches. As he spoke there was a considerable fall of soot, choking the fire and falling out in a flurry on to the tiled surround of the fireplace. The next moment, startling him so that he lost balance and fell over backwards, there came a rush of air before his face, an infernal breath of charred soot and singed feathers, a beat of pinions. Something, a winged presence, was flitting soundlessly in the spaces above. Incredulous, still sprawled there, Benson peered up through the smoky haze: a white owl was flying round and round, high up against the ceiling.

At this moment, startling him rather horribly, there came a sharp knock at the door. “Yes?” he called. “What is it?”

“Votter you up to?”

“I am doing my yoga.” He saw his door knob turning as Mrs Dollinger tried to effect an entrance.

“Open this door immediate,” she shouted furiously.

“I can’t.” Benson was sweating. He could feel his heart beating rapidly. The smoke in the room was hurting his throat. “I’m in the lotus position,” he called.

“I see smoke come out the chimney.”

Benson thought he heard soft sounds of collision above him as if the owl was knocking into things; perhaps all this shouting was panicking the creature. He shuffled on his backside nearer to the door. “I have just been burning a few old Guardians and Observers,” he said quietly, with his mouth close to the woodwork.

Mrs Dollinger remained silent for some moments as if computing this answer. It must seem strange and mad to her that his voice was coming so quietly and from a source so near to the floor. Might she think he meant humans? “Newspapers,” he said, sensing the rage of Mrs Dollinger through the thin panelling.

“This I will tell to Dollinger,” she said, in a voice loaded with threat. After some moments more of silence he heard her walk away. Relief at this was tempered by anxiety; the idea of Dollinger was intimidating, mainly because Benson had never actually spoken to him or looked into his face. He lived in the basement with Mrs Dollinger, and was rarely seen above ground. Benson had glimpsed him from a distance once, on a Sunday morning, when the Dollingers were returning from Mass, a powerfully-built man in a dark suit. He had close-cut hair and a thick moustache like an old-fashioned wrestler. In fact, that was said to have been his profession.

However, this was not the time to think about Dollinger. There was an owl in his room; a visitant, an omen, but real; it was still there, up against the ceiling, circling in panic silence. He was afraid it would hurt itself. He opened the sash-windows as far as he could, but the owl would not fly low enough to find the opening. His door gave on to the stairwell, two floors above street level: the owl would be in worse case out there. Meanwhile, every sound, every movement he made, terrified it more.

He crept over to the bedroom door, opened it, retreated. The owl got through almost at once into the relative dimness there and found a resting place in the farthest corner, on top of the wardrobe. Benson crouched at the door, peering in. He saw the savage grip of the creature’s talons, saw its eyes – frontal, human-looking, like no other bird’s – turned unblinkingly towards him. The fire was out now, smothered with soot, and these few minutes with the windows open had been enough to make the room very cold. What was he to do?

Just then he thought he heard Rathbone’s door closing: perhaps he had come out for a cigarette. Rathbone was a hypnotist, a good deal of whose business came from people who wanted to stop smoking. They came to him and he spoke to them in his husky, compelling voice, telling them they didn’t really want or need cigarettes. However, he was himself a heavy smoker and his addiction put him in a constant dilemma. He couldn’t smoke in view of the people he was supposed to be curing; he couldn’t smoke in his apartment between clients because the smell would give him away. So quite often he came out to the landing for a feverish cigarette. Rathbone might know what to do about the owl.

Benson opened his door and stepped out. Sure enough, Rathbone was on the landing below, smoking. Advancing down the flight of stairs towards him, Benson said softly, “I’ve got an owl in my apartment.”

Rathbone did not seem surprised to hear this. Benson thought he probably heard all sorts of things anyway, in a profession like this. He watched the hypnotist draw deeply, broodingly, on his cigarette. Rathbone was a dramatic-looking man, tall and gaunt, with black hair and close-set black eyes and a long curving nose. He dressed always in black and had an air of fallen grandeur and gloomy energy about him. He had been struck off the list of licensed hypnotherapists for a sexual misdemeanour which he sometimes hinted at in a veiled, sarcastic manner. He was well versed in symbols and a great admirer of Jung. His ambition was to become a stage hypnotist and make a name for himself and money.

“How would you go about getting it out?” Benson asked.

“Athena’s bird,” Rathbone said. “A white owl? Interesting. Athena, of course, is the personification of the Anima. I suppose you knew that?”

“Well, yes, I did, as a matter of fact. But at present I am more concerned with—”

“Born straight from Zeus’s head. So she is a force within the mind of man, you see. Not woman. Athena is the protectress of heroes, symbolising a positive relationship with the Anima, protecting it against the dark forces of the feminine. It was she who taught men the use of bridle and yoke, which is the representation of an inner female principle enabling man to bridle his passions and yoke the male and female sides of his being in harmony. It was she—”

“Look,” Benson said. “All this is fascinating and another time I’d love to hear about it because I do believe that this owl has a meaning for me personally, but Mrs Dollinger might be passing any minute and I have my reasons for not wanting to bump into her just now.”

“On the rampage, is she? I thought I heard shouts.”

“All I did was light a bit of a fire and now she has threatened me with Dollinger.”

“That’s bad,” Rathbone said. “I am told he’s a professional wrestler.”

“I thought you might be able to give me some practical advice about how to get this owl out of my apartment and back into the freedom of its native habitat.”

“No good trying anything in the daylight,” Rathbone said without hesitation. “Owls are virtually blind in the daylight. You’ve got to wait until night. They’ve got this marvellous night vision. Leave your windows open. Go out and have a drink or two – it’s not far off opening time. When you get back you will find the premises vacated.”

“I’ll give it a try.” Benson was already making his way back up the stairs. Rathbone’s advice possessed the greatest merit advice can possess, coinciding exactly with his inclination. He need do nothing but have a few drinks and wait for the night to work its magic. He went stealthily back into the apartment, seized his overcoat and left.