The Winged Bull Read online

  At the top of the stairs there was another door, and this also Brangwyn unlocked with a latch-key, though why both doors should require keys was difficult to understand, for no other entrance opened into the slot-like passage and stairs. Brangwyn switched on the light and held the door open for his companion to enter, and Murchison found himself in another world.

  The entire upper part of the corner house and its two neighbours had been reconstructed, leaving the façade intact, so that there was nothing outside to hint at what was within.

  A whole floor had been pulled clean out of the corner house, making the lounge hall into which they entered spacious and lofty. A great chimney of mellowed brick, salved from the discarded party wall, occupied the rear angle of the fan-shaped apartment; on its wide, flat hearth a pile of wood and peat awaited lighting, though the place was warm almost to stuffiness with central heating. Thick soft rugs lay about on the dark polished parquetry of the floor, and a divan and two vast armchairs flanked the hearth. Books lined the walls from the floor to the gallery, supported on massive posts of old timber that had once been floor-joists, and on to the gallery opened doors that were presumably bedrooms.

  Brangwyn bent down and put a match to the pile on the hearth. ‘I believe in plenty of fire-lighters,’ he said, as the flames roared up the chimney.

  Murchison drew his chair up to the now blazing fire and stretched out in luxurious comfort. Brangwyn was a tall, slight, dark-skinned man; and his black hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, was greying over the ears and receding over the temples. That was the only difference the years had made to him, thought Murchison, as he watched him picking and choosing among a formidable array of bottles.

  The cocktail Brangwyn finally evolved, after much thought and care and accuracy, was amber-coloured and aromatic, not quite like anything Murchison had ever met before; but it had an authentic kick in it. It amused him to observe that Brangwyn, who looked so ascetic, could be so fastidious in every detail of his way of living. Everything about him seemed to have had the most careful thought lavished on it, though nothing in itself was of any great intrinsic value.

  ‘Getting a trifle warm, don’t you think?’ said Brangwyn. He rose and opened a cupboard in the wall, inset among the books, and revealed an array of what looked like voluminous silk dressing-gowns ranged on hangers. He selected a dark crimson one, and then paused and eyed Murchison, and selected another of peacock blue shading off to emerald. ‘Like this?’ he questioned. Murchison did not quite know what was expected’ of him, and returned a polite noncommittal affirmative. ‘Then shed your coat and collar and get into it,’ said Brangwyn.

  Murchison did as he was bid, shedding coat, waistcoat and collar after the example of his host, and was amazed to find the extraordinary change that came over his mood as the silk folds fell about him. In this garb he could have ‘invoked the Great God Pan without any embarrassment.

  They sank into a companionable silence after another round of cocktails, watching the fire change and glow and fall apart in caves of flame. Murchison found Brangwyn an extraordinarily interesting study, apart from the liking and respect he had always had for him. He had evidently brought the art of living up to the level of an applied science. Murchison approved with a sigh of envy. That, beyond all question, was the right way to live; but it needed cash, and plenty of it.

  ‘You like my little place?’ Brangwyn broke the silence conversationally.

  ‘I like it immensely.’

  ‘I suppose you wonder why I elect to live in a slum?’ Brangwyn continued. ‘I am like Oscar Wilde; I can manage without necessities so long as I can have luxuries. I picked up this bit of slum property cheap. I didn’t attempt to recondition it. I gutted it. I left the front alone because if I had put in decent windows I should only have had ‘em broken twice a week. It isn’t tactful to make yourself out to be better than your neighbours in this part of the world.

  The chaps in the shops underneath are my tenants; in fact, the lad in the bookshop is a manager, not a tenant, because book-collecting is one of my hobbies. The fellow in the Italian restaurant has to look after me as part of his rent. It works admirably. You should see him supervising the charwomen. I will give him a ring when we want supper, and he will come up the back stairs and produce it out of his hat.’

  Whether it was the drinks, or all this warmth and light after his drab existence, Murchison could not have said, but he felt his whole personality changing and unfolding and flowering as he lay back in the big chair sharing the tranquil silence. His host arose and phoned for a meal, and they adjourned to a small but beautifully equipped little dining-room, where a dark, lively Italian, the owner of the restaurant, served them with admirable food.

  As Murchison had expected, the talk swung round to his own affairs when they returned to the lounge after dinner. ‘What were you up to when I met you, calling upon Pan in front of the British Museum?’ Brangwyn said suddenly.

  Murchison jumped as if he had been stung. ‘Raising the devil, I suppose,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Living with my brother, who’s a clergyman, and his wife, who’s a clergyman’s wife, is apt to make you want to raise the devil if you can’t raise the wind.’

  ‘It appeared to me,’ said Brangwyn, ‘that you were well on the way to obtaining the presence of Pan when I interrupted you.’

  Murchison did not answer, but Brangwyn fancied he pricked up his ears.

  ‘Have you ever seen that invocation performed effectually?’ he continued.

  ‘No,’ said Murchison.

  ‘I have, and the results are very striking. Panic is what he produces in the unprepared, but in those who are prepared for his coming he produces a divine inebriation.’

  ‘Oh, does he?’ said Murchison sulkily, ‘I prefer beer myself.’

  Brangwyn saw that it was inadvisable to pursue the matter further, and came to the point abruptly, ‘Murchison, would you care to consider the offer of a post as secretary-chauffeur with myself? It’s only temporary, I am afraid, because I am liable to be called abroad at any time, and then the arrangement would have to come to an end, but I would help you to get fixed up with something else after you had finished with me.’ That gave him a bolt-hole if Murchison did not come up to expectations.

  Murchison’s first reaction was a horrible suspicion that he was being offered charity, but he looked up with a sudden, quick smile that completely changed his face. ‘I’d like the job first-rate,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best for you, you know that.’

  ‘Splendid!’ said Brangwyn. ‘You can fetch your belongings tomorrow. Meanwhile, I suggest we think about turning in. I hope you won’t mind if I put you in my sister’s room until I can get one fixed up for you.’

  ‘Your sister’s room?’

  ‘Yes, she keeps a couple of rooms as a pied a terre, but she doesn’t use them much.’

  Brangwyn rose and led the way up a corkscrew wooden stair in the corner on to the gallery that ran round the room at half its height. He opened a door and entered a small room furnished as a sitting-room, passed through it into a bathroom, and then on into a bedroom, Murchison following him.

  ‘A complete flat, you see,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. ‘All ready for occupation. We always keep the bed made up in case she appears unexpectedly.’

  Good nights having been said, Murchison strewed his clothes all over the room in the manner his sister-in-law had never been able to break him of, and then gathered them up hastily in case the redoubtable Miss Brangwyn did indeed return unexpectedly. He wondered what sort of an old dame she would prove to be. Was she lean and cantankerous, or placid and whale-like?

  He got into the heavy silk pyjamas that had been lent him, but did not feel like sleep. He wandered into the sitting-room to see if he could find a book. There were plenty of books here, just as there were downstairs. Miss Brangwyn was evidently a lady with catholic tastes in the literal, but by no means the theological, sense. Modern
science and ancient philosophy jostled each other on her shelves, together with many modern novels and a very representative selection of the poets. Embarras de richesse here, thought Murchison, moving from shelf to shelf round the little room. He picked out a book at last. Jung on the Psychology of the Unconscious. He opened it and glanced at the fly-leaf, and there was his friend the Babylonian bull, wings neatly folded over his back, great bull-foot advanced, and on his plinth the name Ursula Brangwyn.

  Murchison nearly dropped the book in his astonishment. He thrust it hastily back into its place on the shelf, got into bed, and turned out the light.

  It may have been this last act, or it may have been Brangwyn’s cocktails that made him dream. For dream he did, and dreams of a quality he had never had before. He thought he heard an organ being played in the distance, and the chanting of a mighty choir drawing near and dying away and drawing near again. He dreamt of the War, and searchlights playing up and down the sky, only they were coloured searchlights, of the colours of the robes he and Brangwyn had worn at dinner. All these things he seemed to be seeing and hearing between sleeping and waking, and they were vague and a long way off.

  Then suddenly his dreams came to a focus and became crystal-clear and vividly bright, and he dreamt that at the foot of his bed a woman’s head, bodiless, hung in mid-air, no larger than an orange, but vividly living, gazing at him intently. He sat up in bed in his dream and stared back at it open-mouthed, unable even to think. There was a curious likeness to Brangwyn about it. It might have been Brangwyn’s daughter, if he bad ever had a daughter. It neither spoke nor stirred, but it was alive, for the eyelids blinked from time to time. Then it slowly faded, and be woke up to find that he actually was sitting up in bed, but gazing into the blank emptiness of midnight.

  He switched on the bedside stand-lamp and looked round the room. The door was shut and locked as be had left it; but even if it bad not been, the vision could not possibly have been of a living woman because of the smallness of the head. He switched off the light and dropped back on to Miss Brangwyn’s frilled pillow in disgust and slept dreamlessly till morning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Murchison awoke at his usual hour of seven o’clock, and got rather bored hanging about waiting for the ten o’clock breakfast. He did not like to wander about the house uninvited, nor to go out to get a paper, for he did not know how he would get in again in the absence of a latch-key.

  The air, though fresh, was over-warm for his taste. He shed his coat and prowled about in his shirt-sleeves, and felt better. The temperature would be all right if you had nothing much on, but in a thick suit it was decidedly oppressive. Then he shed a bit more, and yet more, until finally, hearing a step on the stair, he hastily seized the silken peacock robe that lay over a chair and flung it about him as a dressing-gown in case the visitor should be Miss Brangwyn.

  But it was Brangwyn himself, in a robe of amber silk, and he smiled when he saw Murchison’s peacock plumage.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see you have realized the value of the robes. All the same, that is not the right shade for the first thing in the morning. And brogues, my dear fellow, do not go well with it. Let me beg of you to wear the appropriate slippers. So much more pleasant for both the feet and the carpets.’

  Murchison, blushing and feeling a fool, did as he was bid, kicking off his thick, clumping brogues and pulling on the soft, heelless, glove-like kid slippers that matched the robe. Silently as two cats in a jungle they made their way down the corkscrew stairs to the dining-room and took their places at a table laid and decorated with every imaginable shade of amber, yellow and orange, gay as a sunrise.

  Everything was to hand, and they waited on themselves. The porridge, in a fireproof casserole, was ready made, but the bacon was artistically laid out in a shallow copper pan, waiting for the current to be switched on in the electric grill, and they ate their porridge to the accompaniment of its frisky spittings as it cooked, and the silver tinklings of the coffee as it trickled through the percolator.

  They were tranquilly digesting their breakfast with the aid of cigarettes when Brangwyn shot a sudden question at his guest.

  ‘What did you dream of last night?’

  Murchison sat up as if a pin had been stuck into him. He hated these sudden questions that forced him to speak of the things that should never be spoken of and expose his secret self to ridicule. His first impulse was to deny that he had dreamed, or to make up an imaginary dream for his employer’s delectation; but he knew that if his employer were a Freud fan, an imaginary dream would be just as revealing as the genuine article. He therefore determined to offer nothing but the truth, even if not the whole truth.

  ‘I dreamt of a church service. Scraps, you know, nothing definite. Music, mainly. And of the searchlights we had during the War, only coloured, like our robes. Then I woke up for a bit, and then went to sleep again and didn’t dream any more till I woke up for good at seven.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual lovely houri.’

  ‘Could you describe her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murchison furiously. ‘She was damn like you. And now I suppose you’ll say I’ve got a schoolgirl crush on you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Brangwyn placidly, quite unperturbed by the other’s simmering resentment. ‘There are a lot more things in the subconscious than are dreamed of by our mutual friend, Dr Freud. Forgive my eccentricities, but I am interested in some of the remoter branches of psychology, and one can learn a great deal about a person from their dreams, as you appear to know; and as we are going to work together, and I shall have to place a good deal of reliance on you, I am anxious to know what manner of man you are. I thank you for being frank with me, and I may tell you that I am quite satisfied.’

  It was close on eleven before they concluded their leisurely breakfast, and Murchison doffed his robe, put on his clumping brogues, and set off to collect his belongings from his brother’s house. It seemed like coming out not only into another world, but also into another century, when he stepped out of the front door that was black mahogany on one side and grained deal on the other. He felt rather as if he were a swimmer coming to the surface for a breath of air after the exoticisms of Brangwyn’s flat. He made his way over the wholesome, mundane pavements in God’s good air, and took the Tube for Acton.

  It was nearly noon when he reached his brother’s house, but he was met on the steps by a slattern with a bucket and swab, who shrieked to her mistress: ‘‘E’s come back, mum!’

  The mistress of the house appeared, clad in a soiled afternoon dress that did duty instead of an overall, and, not being washable, was decidedly less sanitary. She had her hair in a bun behind, and a hair-net over her fringe.

  ‘So you’ve come back at last? And did you get that post?’

  Murchison thought how he would have smarted under that inquiry, with the char listening, if it were as his sister-in-law suspected it was. He had a shrewd suspicion that they had never expected him to get that post, knowing he had none of the qualifications that it required.

  ‘No,’ he replied evenly. ‘But I have got another, and much better, job, with a fellow I knew during the War, and whom I met quite by chance, and I have come to fetch my things.’

  ‘Fetch your things?’ exclaimed his sister-in-law. ‘Do you mean to say you are leaving us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murchison, ‘I am glad to say I shall be able to take myself off your hands at last.’

  It had been regularly rubbed into him that what he paid did not cover what he ate, and that they badly needed his room for their ever-expanding family; but his sister-in-law appeared to have forgotten all that, and rapped out like a defrauded boarding-house-keeper:

  ‘You can’t leave without notice like that. How do you expect us to manage without your money coming in?’

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Murchison, ‘I always understood I was accepting charity!’

  This nonplussed Mrs James for the moment, an
d made her feel she was not doing herself justice, and Murchison did not improve matters by turning on his heel and marching upstairs to his room and slamming the door behind him. He did not trouble to pack formally, but flung all his small gear pell-mell into his old suitcase, chucked the bulkier stuff loose into a taxi, and was gone within ten minutes of entering the house.

  He had fairly burnt his boats behind him, he thought to himself with a chuckle, as he sat among his piled-up belongings in the taxi. If he were out of a job again he would have to sleep on the Embankment, Acton would have none of him. But somehow he did not think it would come to that. He had a strong inner feeling, that rose again as often as he tried to curb its exuberance, that his luck had turned.

  Arrived in Cosham Street, he inserted the latch-key his employer had given him, and went in. From one of the deep chairs by the fireplace someone arose, who had evidently been waiting there for his arrival, and he found himself confronted by a tall, slender, dark girl, very like Brangwyn. The very girl, in fact, whose head, no bigger than an orange, had appeared at the foot of his bed in his dream. He was so startled that he stood clutching his battered old suitcase, quite unable to take the hand she held out to him or respond to her greeting. If the bull of Babylon had walked off its pedestal he could not have been more taken aback.

  She smiled at his confusion.

  ‘I am Ursula Brangwyn,’ she said, ‘Alick’s sister. Or, rather, his half-sister. And you, I believe, are Mr Murchison?’

  Murchison recovered himself sufficiently to take and shake the hand she was still holding out to him and to admit his identity.

  ‘I had better show you your room,’ she said, and led the way up the corkscrew stairs, went along the gallery past her own apartments, and opened a door in the corner, which gave on a narrow and steep stair that had evidently been part of the original fabric of the house. At the top she opened another door, which was covered with brown baize as if to render it sound-proof, and stepped out on to a small landing lit by a glass door which gave access to a roof-garden.