Mother London Read online

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Mother London

  A Novel

  Edited by John Davey

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  London, 1941

  PART ONE

  Entrance to the City

  The Patients

  David Mummery

  Mary Gasalee

  Josef Kiss

  PART TWO

  High Days

  Queen Boadicea 1957

  Thomas à Becket 1963

  Captain Jack Cade 1968

  Nell Gwynn 1972

  Sherlock Holmes 1980

  Princess Diana 1985

  PART THREE

  The Unheard Voice

  Waiting Rooms 1956

  Gypsy Gardens 1954

  Lost Stations 1951

  Lavender Walls 1949

  Changing Posts 1945

  Late Blooms 1940

  PART FOUR

  Fast Days

  Early Departures 1940

  Premature Burials 1946

  Abstract Relations 1950

  Alternating Couplings 1956

  Successive Movements 1964

  Variable Currents 1970

  PART FIVE

  The Angered Spirit

  The World’s End 1985

  The Yours Truly 1981

  The Merry Monarch 1977

  The Axe and Block 1969

  The Pilgrim’s Gate 1965

  The Old Bran’s Head 1959

  PART SIX

  Departure of the Citizens

  Josef Kiss

  Mrs Gasalee

  David Mummery

  The Celebrants

  Also by Michael Moorcock from Orion

  Copyright

  For my children, Sophie, Kate and Max,

  and their children, Alex, Tom and Bobby

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Clare Peake for permission to quote ‘London, 1941’ by Mervyn Peake.

  Quotations from Wheldrake’s Penultimate Poems 1897 are published by permission of the copyright holder.

  Several broadsheets and popular songs quoted are from Curiosities of Street Literature collected by Charles Hindley, 1873, reprinted 1966 by John Foreman the Broadsheet King, and The Minstrelsy of England ed. Edmonstoune Duncan, 1905.

  ‘Love’s Calendar’ is published by permission of Lorcenius Music Co. Ltd, 1887.

  ‘Madcap Mary and Gentleman Joe’ is from The London Rakehell; or, Harlequin Upon the Town by M.C. O’Crook, 1798.

  Thanks are particularly due to my wife Linda Steele for her research and editorial work on this book.

  London, 1941

  Half masonry, half pain; her head

  From which the plaster breaks away

  Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned

  Upon a neck of stones; her eyes

  Are lid-less windows of smashed glass,

  Each star-shaped pupil

  Giving upon a vault so vast

  How can the head contain it?

  The raw smoke

  Is inter-wreathing through the jaggedness

  Of her sky-broken panes, and mirror’d

  Fires dance like madmen on the splinters.

  All else is stillness save the dancing splinters

  And the slow inter-wreathing of the smoke.

  Her breasts are crumbling brick where the black ivy

  Had clung like a fantastic child for succour

  And now hangs draggled with long peels of paper,

  Fire-crisp, fire-faded awnings of limp paper

  Repeating still their ghosted leaf and lily.

  Grass for her cold skin’s hair, the grass of cities

  Wilted and swaying on her plaster brow

  From winds that stream along the street of cities:

  Across a world of sudden fear and firelight

  She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,

  Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;

  A figure of dry wounds – of winter wounds –

  O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.

  – Mervyn Peake,

  from Shapes and Sounds, 1941

  Part One

  Entrance to the City

  I do not know how many tons of high explosives have been tipped out upon the gigantic target of London since the Battle of London began on August 24th, 1940. The result is a grim city, a shabby city, except round and about Guildhall, where several famous streets have been burned to the ground.

  The people of London, having developed a technique of living in the face of repeated danger, now accept the preposterous, and what was until so recently the incredible, as the normal background of existence. I often think that the ability to reduce the preposterous and the incredible to the level of commonplace is a singularly English gift.

  H.V. Morton’s London, February 1941

  The Patients

  ‘BY MEANS OF certain myths which cannot easily be damaged or debased the majority of us survive. All old great cities possess their special myths. Amongst London’s in recent years is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance.’

  Setting aside his antique fountain pen David Mummery pauses to stick a newspaper picture of the Temple beside the article he is preparing which will again be favourable to the City’s freemasons and must surely guarantee his entrance into their brotherhood; then London’s subterranean secrets will at last be his. Mummery wets his lips with a blue flannel. Lately his mouth has been dry all the time.

  Calling himself an urban anthropologist, and with an impressive record of mental illness, Mummery lives by writing memorials to legendary London. Peeling dried glue from his swollen fingers, he glances up at the brass-bound mahogany clock with a mercury pendulum which blends into a wall of miscellaneous but chiefly patriotic images and, lifting the lid of his nineteenth-century clerical desk, replaces the notebook beside an old ear-trumpet which holds his pens. As he gets up he begins to sing what is for him almost a lullaby. Blake, in the main, has a calming effect.

  ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold…’

  A crowded museum of ephemera, of late Victorian advertisements, Edwardian crested ware, ’20s and ’30s magazines, wartime memorabilia, posters from the Festival of Britain, toy Guardsmen, Dinky delivery vans, lead aeroplanes, his room’s surfaces are covered by confused and varied strata, uncatalogued and frequently unremembered. Mummery can explain how these are his sources of information, his revelatory icons, his inspiration.

  At the centre of this great collage is a framed newspaper photograph of a V-Bomb flying over London. This is Mummery’s private memento mori. He believes it might even be one of the two which almost killed him as a child. He glances past stacks of books and ancient board games on his window sills to the thinning mist outside. Almost invisible, the low December sun is dimly reflected by the cold slate of terraced roofs. After reaching his hands towards the embers of the small fire he lit at dawn in the black cast-iron grate he opens the doors of an old Heal’s wardrobe and begins methodically to dress in four or five layers of clothing; lastly adding a large black bearskin hat to expose only a hint of pink flesh and his unusually bright eyes when he lets himself out onto the dowdy landing and runs downstairs to leave his lodgings where Maida Vale borders on Kilburn and catch his Wednesday bus. Lately he has been feeling painfully cold.

  The V-Bomb moves with steady grace before the blustering East wind as it crosses the channel and reaches Brighton, passing low enough over the town for people in the Pavilion Gardens to see it rush by, the yellow fire from its tail glaring against the broken cloud; it will reach Croydon in minutes then in a further minute South London when, its fuel gone, it will fall on
the suburb where David Mummery, almost five years old, plays with his toy soldiers. Forty-seven feet long and carrying two thousand pounds of explosive, this sophisticated machine, the combined genius and labour of amoral scientists, serf technicians and slave workers, is about to bring a miracle into my life.

  David Mummery is also writing his memoirs. Some of these have yet to be made coherent; some are still in his mind. Some he has considered inventing.

  Small and bundled, Mummery presents a shapeless profile as he walks rapidly beneath dark leafless planes to his stop, congratulating himself that as usual he is a few minutes ahead of the main rush-hour crowd which must soon begin its progress up a high street already roaring with traffic from the suburbs. It gives him familiar satisfaction to be only third in the queue when the throbbing scarlet double-decker draws in for its passengers to mount. Finding himself a downstairs seat two rows back from the driver’s cabin he rubs a neat circular spot on the fogged window, peering out with quirky pleasure as the bus approaches grey, unthreatening Paddington.

  Frequently Mummery imagines the city streets to be dry riverbeds ready to be filled from subterranean sources. From behind the glass he watches his Londoners. This fabulous flotsam. They come from Undergrounds and subways (their ditches and their burrows) flowing over pavements to where myriad transports wait to divert them to a thousand nearby destinations. The mist has dissipated. A cold sun now brightens this eruption of souls. Through streets enlivened by their noise small crowds flow: through alleys and lanes and narrow boulevards. At this distance Mummery loves them: his impulse is to remove his woollen gloves, reach through his overcoat, his muffler, his jacket, his cardigan, find his notepad and record how the sunshine glitters off worn stone, new concrete and dirty red brick, off frozen flesh; but he makes his hands remain at rest in his lap: presently he has no need of scenery: he must devote himself to the Masons. Having delivered his latest manuscript (Five Famous Whitehall Phantoms) to his publisher on the previous Monday he is free from any immediate financial considerations and now desires almost painfully to be back near his canal and his old women, with his personal nostalgia. As the bus passes a curved metal railway bridge and runs under a white flyover he thinks of the millions of predestined individuals driving or being driven in a million directions, their breath, their smoke, their exhausts softening the sharpness of the morning air.

  Momentarily Mummery feels as if London’s population has been transformed into music, so sublime is his vision; the city’s inhabitants create an exquisitely complex geometry, a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics: nothing else makes sense of relationships between roads, rails, waterways, subways, sewers, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts, cables, between every possible kind of intersection. Mummery hums a tune of his own improvising and up they come still, his Londoners, like premature daisies, sometimes singing, or growling, or whistling, chattering; each adding a further harmony or motif to this miraculous spontaneity, up into the real world. Oh, they are wonderful like this, today.

  ‘… but she’s only a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden frame!’ An old song as ever on his delicious lips, Josef Kiss mounts the footboard of the bus, much as a pirate might swing himself into his victim’s rigging. Eccentric clothes swirl about his massive person. Advancing into the body of the vehicle he appears to expand to fill up the available space. He plucks off his leather gloves, unbuttons his Crombie, loosens his long scarf. Watching him partly in reflection, partly from the corner of his eye, Mummery half expects Josef Kiss to hand the garments to his conductor, together with a generous tip. Mr Kiss places himself across the left front seat and sighs. As a matter of principle he makes everything he does a pleasure.

  At Mr Kiss’s back an orange-haired woman with chapped skin and a nose rubbed red by coarse tissues reassures herself, speaking to her friend: ‘I thought I’d better see the priest. It couldn’t do any harm. Well, I saw him. He said it was all nonsense and I wasn’t to bother myself about it and to have nothing to do with Mrs Craddock. That suited me down to the ground.’

  Really lovely eyes and hair but she’ll kill herself at this rate.

  ‘All aboard, please. There you are, love. Mind that bag, sir, if you please. Thank you, thank you very, very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you, madam. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.’ With insane patience, his face hanging in regular folds under his grey hair so he resembles a natty bloodhound, the conductor scurries about his aisles and stairs. ‘Cheer up, love, it’ll all be over by Christmas. There’s going to be a whip-round for my retirement. Keep talking, that’s the secret, Mr Kiss. You know that as well as I do.’ He speaks in a quiet moment between Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill. Grey, massive houses, monuments to the optimism of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, once multiple-occupied, the background to a scandal which destroyed lives and careers and rocked a government, slowly being reclaimed from the exploited immigrant by the upwardly mobile whites, go slowly by on both sides, behind trees. ‘But this is nothing. The tourist routes in the summer are murder. They never know where they’re going. You can’t blame them for it, can you? Imagine what we’d be like in New York. Or Baghdad. And how’s your sisters?’

  ‘Hale as ever, Tom. Oh, very well.’

  ‘I thought that was where you were coming from. Give them my best when you see them. Tell them I miss them. Tell them I’m retiring. I’ll be in Putney, though. Not too far.’ Tom winks as he steadies himself on the vertical chromium rail before the bus takes a lumbering turn, putting the renamed cinema and the Bhelpuri House at its back. Both will be gone in a year, making way for some empty title, a new development.

  ‘They say they can’t afford London Transport any more, Tom.’ Josef Kiss regards their surroundings with the greed of someone who has regretted too many disappearances and losses. His gentle smile suggests resignation.

  The conductor shifts his money bag in order to sit down on the seat across from Josef Kiss. His response is to chuckle. His chuckling helps him maintain his equilibrium. ‘They could buy and sell the Duke of Westminster.’

  Mr Kiss’s smile indicates a broad consent. He glances casually back and does not recognise Mummery.

  There is no dishonour in flight. There is no blame in failing to enter the fire. I did nothing to harm her. But he could not know he was my rival. In some distress, Mummery rises, disembarks and runs, an awkwardly animated stuffed beast, for the Tube at Notting Hill, taking the steps two at a time, careering through the barrier, waving his weekly pass, flying down the escalator in time to force himself through the doors of a Circle Line train for High Street Kensington where he changes to a Wimbledon-bound District Line and sits alone as the carriage sighs and rumbles as far as Putney Bridge where he jumps out, dashes through the exit into Ranelagh Gardens, momentarily claustrophobic amongst the oddly arranged terracotta houses, to the trees and steeples and undecorated slabs, the hullabaloo of the bridge where traffic jostles to cross the Thames, and there before him is a Number 30 bus heading South. He leaps to the platform just as the bus moves forward again and the river is revealed, beyond it the Star and Garter and all the other rosy English Domestic brick behind tall bare trees on the further shore. For a moment the light turns the water to quicksilver. Gulls rise and fall around the bridge. Mary Gasalee is aboard, seated on the bench behind him, next to Doreen Templeton. They are patients at the same Clinic. Neither woman acknowledges Mummery. Perhaps his big hat disguises him. Mummery lapses into the comfort of despair. He imagines himself falling before their eyes into the water, describing an exceptionally beautiful curve, his expression beatific; he begins to radiate forgiveness, a profoundly elaborate form of self-pity.

  ‘Mary Gasalee, that boy’s in pain.’

  There’s no pain in the fire, she thinks, but she turns her head. The boy stands on the platform waiting to get off. The water seems reflected in his grey pallor. He holds the handrail with all his strength. His face is t
hin; those might be spots of fever below his dulled eyes. Dumbly he challenges her glance. He’s not mine, she thinks and looks out at the passing shops, at McDonald’s, Mothercare, at W.H. Smith and Our Price. As the bus continues up Putney High Street, the boy jumps free. His mustard-coloured duffel coat flaps like useless wings. He’s not my yellow doll.

  Doreen Templeton gets up first. They have reached their stop. Mary follows her. They step down to the pavement. ‘Couldn’t you feel his pain, Mary?’ Again and again Doreen Templeton wraps herself in her coat. They walk slowly up the hill towards the open Heath, a few bushes, some scruffy trees. ‘I could. But I’m very oversensitive, as you know. Maybe I imagined it.’

  Mrs Gasalee is no longer responsive. She believes Doreen Templeton’s apparent concern for others is merely another way of getting attention. Doreen’s sensitivity is at best mere imposition, a sentimental exercise, for she never does anything about her ‘intuitions’. While Doreen is not stupid (she sometimes admits her self-deceptions) she is completely selfish. Mrs Gasalee has now disliked her for five months. Doreen has yet to notice; she continues condescendingly to describe her own highly tuned mental condition and its effect on the less blessed, like her family and her former husband. Mrs Gasalee’s replies to Doreen are from old habit ritualistic, only apparently engaged. Content to have mere confirmation, Doreen never questions them.

  They reach the green gate of the converted vicarage, the NHSS Special Clinic. Mrs Gasalee begins to tremble out of many causes. Doreen sighs. ‘Well, love, here we go again.’

  From the débris flies the Black Captain, his hands stretched towards the infant Mummery immovable amongst brick and plaster, one of the V2’s few survivors.

  Behind them, hesitating until he sees them pass through the gate, David Mummery looks back down the hill to where Josef Kiss turns the corner; today his has been the slower route. Mr Kiss always comes by the same bus but Mummery usually varies his own journey since it is one of his few ways of relieving the tedium of overly secure habits which, even when they torture him, are preferable to uncertainty. Mummery craves the familiar as an alcoholic craves drink but dignifies these cravings as an example of his own nobility, of his enduring love. Thus he still nurtures his passion for Mrs Gasalee, preferring to yearn for her rather than risk a new romance; holding on to familiar and simple childhood verities and letting the past remain golden, tarnished only by the unthinkable shadow of others’ needs and ambitions. He longs for the emotional intimacy he knew with Mary Gasalee and is determined, though she will not return to him again, never to experience the same intimacy with another woman: his enduring love, his self-congratulation, is a deception presenting itself as a definition.