On the way back to the college, Daniel lit a cigarette, which brought a disapproving look from Ferdi, whose own bad habits all precluded smelling bad. He sped up his walking slightly to remain upwind. As they approached Rahul’s shop and Daniel’s new home above it, he turned to Ferdi to exchange standard pleasantries about the afternoon they had shared together. But it was almost supper time. What were Ferdi’s plans? Ferdi spoke first. “Evensong is next. Pop upstairs and drop your things. We’ll just make it into chapel before the Preces.”
Daniel had been wearing the same clothes for forty hours now. A shower and a good sleep and a new day in his new threads could wait a little longer. “I’m up for it, but I’m not much of a churchgoer right now, Ferdi.”
“Oh no, no, no. It’s just another beautiful thing we do. If we don’t, who will? It’s part of the fabric of this city and country, you know. And Father Odo’s a good thing. Rather, he’s something you must see. With any luck he’ll have us in for dinner afterward.”
Five minutes later, they passed back through the main entrance to the college, walking briskly as the bell struck its first of five loud tones. One of the porters, a skinny tattooed veteran of the Falklands War named Ken, called out to Daniel from behind. “Mr. Perrin! I have a message for you, sir. A lady rang for you a couple of hours ago. I’ve taken a message, sir.” He handed Daniel a note: “Going to search for your luggage tomorrow at Victoria Coach Station. Have you got your mobile? See you soon, Susan.”
He stood still in the middle of the Quad, noticing the air was suddenly much cooler than it had been when he and Ferdi were hustling back from Marks & Spencer. Ferdi scolded Daniel, “Well come on! Odo will not be best pleased to see us bound in there late.” Daniel stuffed the note into his jacket pocket and scurried through the portico and into the chapel doorway.
The boys from the choir school were singing the service alone that night, without the men from the college, and the crowd was sparse. An American study-abroad kid from a small Christian college had found C.S. Lewis’ famous stall on the far lefthand side, the cantoris or north side of the chancel. No one was sitting anywhere near him, but Sid climbed up the creaky steps to tell him to remove his baseball cap. Unused to such a request and a little confused, the young man finally obliged.
In the middle of the back row of the choir stalls on the south side of the room stood the Dean of Divinity, the Very Reverend Odo Wigborough, who was clad in a black cassock, flowing white surplice, black preaching scarf, and the familiar red Oxford M.A. hood. He was not especially tall, but he was wiry and unusually muscular for a man of almost sixty, with close cropped, thinning white hair and a toothy smile, the top canines jutting noticeably up and out. When he opened his mouth, there was a glint of silver from the left molar behind the sharp chopper in front of it. He spoke in an artificially deep voice and regaled listeners with wild tales from his years as Dean of Jerusalem, an exile from which he had finally been brought back to England and into university life. He was originally an Essex man, and proud of it.
Odo insisted upon being called Father, and his theory of Anglicanism was that it was the English expression of Eastern Orthodoxy. He was a fearsome tutor who only taught undergraduates, and he was known for having favorites whom he invited to stay and chat after the weekly chapel fellowship meeting. He was an expert in esotericism, and he lectured in the theology faculty on the Book of Enoch and demonology, and he championed writers like Éliphas Lévi and René Guénon. He contended that Julius Evola was a genius, unfairly maligned.
“We simply weren’t there to judge,” he would proclaim loudly. More quietly he would add, “And so what if he did call himself superfascista?” Odo lived during term in college accommodations, but he also maintained a private residence up the Iffley Road, where he kept a collection of rare editions of works by Aleister Crowley.
Ferdi pointed Daniel to the stalls closest to the back, and Daniel went one place too far and plopped down in the college president’s unoccupied seat. Ferdi waved his hand for Daniel to move further in. The choristers had begun the psalm, which Ferdi showed Daniel how to follow in the Prayer Book, a religious artifact similar to what Daniel was used to in the pews of Grace Episcopal Church back home. It was Psalm 36, Dixit injustus: “My heart showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly, * that there is no fear of God before his eyes.” The pauses were too long for Daniel. The time passed slowly.
After fifty minutes, the service was finished, and Ferdi introduced Daniel to a beaming Father Odo. “Well, Ferdinand, what have we here? A new man!” Daniel immediately felt himself in the vested cleric’s thrall.
Ferdi replied, “May I present to you Mr. Daniel Perrin of the United States of America, Father. He’s here to do French of all things. We’ve had to save him from a spot of bother this afternoon. No clothes, you see. Pitiful.”
“Well,” Odo began as he waved perfunctorily to a pair of old townswomen who had cycled down from the parish of St. Mary and St. John, where Odo filled in from time to time out of term. “No clothes, you say! Well, I am having my old friend Michael Taylor in for supper tonight, and Edwin too of course.”
Michael Taylor was once a prominent barrister and evangelical lay leader in the Church of England, but he had expatriated to Zimbabwe and later South Africa some years earlier under suspicious circumstances. Edwin Assmann was the son of a great German Egyptologist who was born in Oxford and had never left. He worked at the Bodleian Library, and he was a frequent companion of Odo’s. None of them were married men. The invitation Ferdi assumed was coming finally arrived. “You two must join us. There’s no one else dining in the Senior Common Room tonight. We shan’t even be up at high table. Do come along.”
Delighted at the young men’s acceptance, Odo walked over to the wooden closet in the corner of the antechapel and replaced his vestments for the night. He then led them to the heavy wooden door of the fellows’ dining room, held open by the college steward, Terry Tyerman, the portly son of a Sheffield steel worker. Terry had avoided the vanishing family occupation after saving up enough money driving a removal van to pay for a course that brought him a diploma in food and drink. He had been working at the college for ten years, spending his days rummaging for vintages in the cellars, and his evenings serving food to the fellows and their guests. In full term, that meant high table. At this time of year and on special occasions, it meant instead the small fellows’ dining room on the cloister right next to the staircase leading up to Jerry and his chips. Terry contrasted sharply with his near namesake upstairs. He was what Daniel’s grandmother would call sharp as a tack, possessing encyclopedic knowledge of growing regions and grape varietals. In his strong Yorkshire accent, he had a poetic way of describing the dishes he served to mostly men and a few women who spent their days reading, writing, and teaching.
It was not nearly cold enough in the dining room for the fireplace, but the logs were lit nonetheless, making the room too cozy, even a little oppressive. There were candles on the table and only minimal artificial light from lamps on the buffet and end tables next to the arm chairs on the other side of the room from the dining table. Terry quickly added two additional place settings and assured Odo with a smile “we’re not likely to run out of food any time soon, sir.” Odo grimaced slightly. “Er, Father,” Terry corrected himself. “Please help yourself to sherry on the buffet there, gentlemen.”
Odo played the host. “Ah, try the dry, Daniel. When I was a young man of your age, I came here to Oxford to interview for a place as a graduate in theology. There were no application forms or test scores or any nonsense like that. Austin Farrer was warden of Keble by then. He was very near the end of his life, and although he took very few students, I was determined that he should be my supervisor. It was all done very easily. He offered me a glass of sherry and said, ‘I should imagine you prefer sweet,’ to which I replied, ‘Dry for me, I’m afraid.’ He poured the glass, handed it to me and said, ‘You’ll do.’ Farrer was a genius and a holy man by popular standards, but I quickly realized that he would prove, well, too dry for me.”
Odo roared with laughter, the points of his teeth glistening again. He continued, “Farrer thought himself a metaphysician, you see, but his beloved St. Thomas Aquinas was far more interested in the occult than he ever was.”
Odo excused himself to talk to Terry, and Daniel turned to the rest of the group, who were topping up their glasses, the smallest drinking vessels Daniel had ever seen. Michael interrogated Daniel on his academic background, and he seemed a little surprised to learn that Daniel had never heard of any of the prestigious American prep schools where Michael had a network of close friends. He explained that he had been a governor at one of England’s most famous schools for years, and he had run an Evangelical boys’ camp geared towards equipping the future elite with Christian values. Edwin appeared a little uncomfortable with the topic. Ferdi changed the subject to the spiritual state of the African continent, a topic that animated Michael. Odo returned with a command, “Drink up, gentlemen. Our dinner is served.” Odo reached around Daniel’s waist with his right hand and Ferdi’s with his left to shepherd both young men to the table.
The starter was a simple leek and potato soup served with a flowery white wine from the Côtes du Rhône, which Daniel enjoyed much more than the dry sherry. He zoned out for the first course and came back to life as Terry took away his empty bowl and set down a sirloin steak, which he described as “preternatural pub style. Mr. Pepys would have written about it in his diary, gentlemen.” Daniel thought it looked delicious, but rather ordinary, and it was certainly not what his father would have called “big fancy beef.” As the men began tearing the meat with their knives, Ferdi drew Odo into a topic which he hoped would provoke the evening’s entertainment.
“Now Father, tell us. How do you think about all this terrorism palaver in light of your theories about evil?” Daniel wasn’t entirely sure what palaver meant, but he suspected it meant Ferdi did not take the matter of terrorism as seriously as everyone did where Daniel came from.
“Ah. Ah-ha. Haha,” Odo sputtered. “You are a devil, aren’t you, Ferdinand? I admit, I have been mulling this matter over for the past month without a soul to discuss it with. Edwin prefers to keep his head in the sand, you know. He helps people find books all day and wants nothing more than to come home and watch University Challenge on the television in the evening. There, there, Edwin. We love you that way. We’re all much too curious. Too curious. A curse. But a cursed age! Well, that’s precisely your question now, is it not, Ferdinand?”
Terry filled the second, larger wine glasses with something red, from a decanter, so that Daniel could not notice its origin. Terry looked poised to describe his selection to the party, but Odo had the room in his grip. The air suddenly felt even heavier as the fire made a sudden loud crackle. Blood dripped from the piece of steak suspended on the prongs of Odo’s fork. He put it down, took an aggressive gulp from his wine glass, and began to speak again. Terry recharged the glass immediately.
“It is a terrible privilege to be alive during this great age of the egregores,” Odo said. “The shape of the apocalypse is more visible by day, and every moment is a spiritual battle of our own making, the expression of our collective imagination gone wild. Psyches connected, tribalized, and weaponized. We have made demons, and they are our masters now. Thus, we must ask ourselves: Will we assert the persistence of the old man, the human, or will we embrace the shadow that engulfs the world as its lights dim and go right out?” He pronounced each of the last three words slowly, and with even more intensity in his voice and eyes than usual.
Michael interjected, timidly, “I say, Odo, what is this you’re talking about? An egregore, is it?” As Odo slurped down a second glassful of wine, Ferdi chimed in. “An egregore is a spiritual being alluded to in the Book of Enoch. Watchers, they’re called in the Book of Daniel. Good ones and bad ones.” Michael rose his eyebrows and replied, “Ah, like guardian angels then. Ye watchers and ye holy ones, and all that.”
“Not exactly,” Ferdi replied, “they may not correspond directly to Jewish and Christian angelology. Perhaps a Babylonian spirit being, or perhaps something older and only hinted at in the Old Testament. They may be the Nephilim, the half-angelic giants that still walked the earth at the time of Noah. Or they are perhaps something much more. Lords of light or darkness. Demigods.”
Odo’s mood lightened temporarily. He turned to Ferdi, laughing, “Almost, Ferdinand! Ha-ha! You simply must attend my lectures next term on Enoch. Not that your supervisor would approve. Of course, I could give him an earful on the relevance of all this cosmology to the science and statesmanship in your beloved twentieth-century history. No one who saw an approaching cloud of mustard gas at the Somme or tested the atom bomb in New Mexico would deny the unleashing of a spiritual power made by man that is also fully capable of ending mankind. And that’s what I mean by egregore. It’s a matter quite beyond the questions of biblical interpretation and dogmatic concerns about angelology. Boring business, all that, anyway. Irrelevant hobbyist preciousness.”
“But what about the St. Michael’s prayer Catholics say?” asked Ferdi. Is there not in traditional Christian religion some understanding of all this strife on the astral plane?
“Oh yes,” Odo replied. “Our Christian ancestors may be accused of superstition, but they put on the armor of God, as St. Paul says. We are not contending against the flesh,” a word Odo elongated with extra emphasis on the shhh sound. “Or blood,” he concluded with a blunt clip at the end, making a t instead of a d sound. “The ancients got all that perfectly right,” he concluded.
Odo motioned to Terry to take away his plate, barely touched, and to refill his wine glass. Daniel had cleaned his plate and was satiated, realizing his first English lunch was still sitting under his supper. He found the wine more delicious than anything he had tasted before, and Terry was topping up his glass as efficiently as he was Odo’s.
Odo resumed.
“The problem, you see, is once the dominant egregore has decidedly supplanted its competitors, one cannot resist it. It is quite futile. Otherwise, one simply lives amid the ruins until it occurs to someone to come round and clean them up. In fact, it will occur to the world soon that this very city in which we live and work is the empty shell of the old dead God’s great fortress. Poor old T.S. Eliot looked around a place like this and relished a fight for a lost cause. That was the American in him talking. Forgive me, Daniel.”
Odo downed another half glass of his wine and kept talking.
“Christianity succeeded because the spirit of Christ, the Anointed One, overcame the gods who protected Rome. But before that, Rome’s gods had defeated the Greek ones, who had defeated the Persian ones, who had defeated the Babylonian ones, who had defeated the Assyrian ones. Ironically, the Jewish spirit or watcher managed to survive all these other conquests. More to the point, it was permitted to persist as a spiritual bargain. The Israelites were allowed to be a people because their egregore vowed no spiritual ambitions. No conversions, for example. But then, der Führer ruined the world forever, because he cancelled the arrangement in a far more violent fashion than any of the earlier essays in antisemitism could have ever hoped to achieve. The final solution!”
He paused to slurp down yet more wine.
“Therefore,” Odo continued, “we see today, Christ’s prophecy of the demise of the evil one, the light-bearer, was short-lived. The prince of the world was cast out, but he has come back, with Baphomet, Baal, Isis, Rah, Leviathan. All of them. Crossing yourself four times facing each cardinal direction and reciting Psalm 63 will not affect them anymore. The exorcist perishes even when he succeeds in driving one of them out of an innocent girl. The power of the Christian spell has been broken, and Christ has left the tabernacles. The glory of the Lord has departed, because no one believes it was ever really there. And the quaint virtue of Christian hope is now only fulfilled in Psalm 88. Darkness, my boys, is our only companion.”
Terry instinctively stepped back towards the buffet, nearly dropping the decanter. A tiny whelp issued from Edwin, who looked to be fighting back tears. Daniel had found Odo’s discourse fascinating, but he suddenly felt uneasy too. Maybe Odo was right earlier on when he said curiosity was more a curse than a blessing.
The door suddenly opened. It was Jerry stumbling in with a tray bearing five desserts that resembled Italian Capezzoli di Venere, or Nipples of Venus, a Brandy and chestnut cake which Daniel recognized from the movie Amadeus. Only these were covered in dark chocolate instead of white. Michael attempted a joke. “What do we have here? Black man’s nipple? Ha!” Odo alone smirked back, replying, “You know something about that, don’t you?” Michael pursed his lips, and both Ferdi and Edwin seemed to understand the context. Daniel was visibly confused. He decided to engage Odo.
“Father, I admit I’ve never heard anything like what you’re telling us, but it doesn’t sit very well with me. Take your critique of Eliot a moment ago. I’ve only been in this country for one day, but I already feel as if there is a realness to it that I never experienced back home in the States. Eliot articulated that depth of experience in his poetry. What you are saying sounds very theoretical and unreal.”
Daniel paused, realizing he had everyone’s complete attention.
“At first, I was surprised to hear a Christian minister talk the way you do, but as you kept on, it occurred to me that your spirituality is a step beyond the concerns I have about prayer and sin, let alone things like angels. Ordinary religion already feels too out there,” Daniel waved his arms in circles. “But at least that stuff has…I don’t know…a positive message or something. There’s meaning, even if we don’t understand what it is yet. Truth that goes beyond this world. Again, I don’t really buy all that right now, but it seems like what you’re saying is we should just, like, kill ourselves or do whatever we want and not care about anything else or anybody else. Like, there’s no point to anything.”
The room stood silent for several seconds as Odo bit into a spoonful of the dessert, then put down his utensil, and wiped the corners of his mouth. He looked directly at Daniel and flashed his full smile. “Not kill ourselves, Daniel, no. But do whatever we want, maybe. Your own popular music icon, Bob Dylan – not my cup of tea, but some of my friends tell me, you know – he once sang something that I have come to understand differently than I once did.”
Odo contorted his mouth to attempt an American accent, then said in a nasal high pitch, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” He smiled again, then returned to his normal voice. “I thought for years I was making a sacrifice at the altar to the former, the Lord, but I realize now there is only the possibility of serving the latter. So why resist? I must say, the old moral dilemmata over which I once agonized now seem so trivial.”
Michael squirmed a little in his chair, and Edwin clinked his spoon on his plate in a gesture designed to break the oppressive silence that usually reigned in between sections of Odo’s speeches. Suddenly standing up with the firelight behind him, Odo’s muscular frame projected strength to his dinner guests. He then declared in an almost saccharine tone, “Let’s move over for port, shall we? And Daniel, I apologise for the quality of the food here in college tonight. I thought the steak rather flavourless and chewy, despite Terry’s propaganda. You must come visit me up the Iffley Road,” he added with a mischievous look, “if you can penetrate that far!”
Odo roared with laughter and appeared a little wobbly with drink as he took Daniel’s arm and sat him in a chair by the fireplace directly next to the trolly, a famous little device in the common room that ensured the after-dinner drinks got to everyone, without anyone having to get up. By custom, Terry withdrew at this stage of the evening and the guests served themselves. Odo sat in the chair on the receiving end of the trolly, directly facing Daniel.
Michael picked up the snuff box from the table that sat in between him and Odo, and he held it up, shifting his eyes and mouth in an inquisitive gesture. “Oh yes, do Michael. We pass the snuff round with the Madeira.”
“Snuff?” Daniel asked.
“Indeed,” Ferdi said. “This will be just your thing, Daniel. I should think you’re dying to light up again, which you are welcome to do here, of course, much as I would prefer you didn’t. We have not yet got to ‘smoking’ and ‘non-smoking’ like in your country. But give this a try. Take a pinch and put it at the base of your thumb and snort it. It clears up a boozy head instantly.”
Odo sat in an alcoholic trance, and Michael turned to Daniel in an attempt to smooth out the rough edges of his old friend’s cosmology. “I absolutely hate theology, you know. Evangelists have no need of it. It is simply useless except to cause more confusion among people who are already confused. Discipline is what we need. I haven’t got a Catholic bone in my body, but I do wish Protestants would do a bit better in support of something like what that Maciel chap has done with his Legion in Mexico. Of course, we’re not forming priests.” He turned to Odo. “Sorry, old man, but on that matter, I wholly agree with you on one point you made earlier. No one is sacrificing anything at altars anymore.”
“One wonders,” Ferdi said, “whether Voltaire’s old dream of using the entrails of priests to strangle a king was supposing more human agency than would be required to turn us all off religion and tradition. For my part, Father Odo, you may be like the pagan shaman offering the final cock to Asclepius, but it is important that you carry on. I’m with Daniel on this matter. Eliot is very inspiring when he encourages us to fight lost causes.”
Edwin appeared despondent, downing his first glass of ruby red Port and nervously filling up another.
At this moment, something snapped in Odo. His eyes popped open again and he inched forward in his chair, staring straight at Daniel. He opened his mouth, and in an even deeper voice than anyone had heard him use that night, he declared, “You are a super super lovely lovely boy.” Then, in an almost superhuman motion, he lunged at Daniel and forced himself on top of him, planting a wet kiss on his mouth. Horrified, Daniel managed to throw Odo off, casting him all the way back into his seat. He then pushed the trolley toward his assailant with all his might. The heavy crystal decanter jumped out of basket and sailed as a missile directly onto Odo’s crotch. He wailed as Daniel jumped out of his chair, walked to the door and turned the enormous iron handle.
A gust of cold air flooded into the dining room, and Daniel disappeared down the corridor, spitting repeatedly and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He made his way through the porter’s lodge, back onto the High Street and finally to the entryway to his staircase. He stumbled up, and with some difficulty, he successfully wielded two different keys to release both the Yale lock and the Chubb lock beneath it, and then he passed out on the bed straightaway.
The Palomar was a world away now.
