The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

It was when Roger began to talk like this, I’m ashamed to say, that I found him most irresistible – even when I knew that I was being controlled and manipulated. It was with a sinking heart, all the same, that I agreed to hand over all of our savings (and rather more) to Crispin in return for his promise that he would sell us, in a few days’ time, the betting slips which both he and Roger assured me would be worth a fortune by then. A sinking heart, and a hollow, nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘Will you telephone me on Saturday?’ I asked. ‘To let me know the outcome – not that it’s in any doubt, of course.’

‘Telephone you? Why on earth would I do that? You’ll be with me, surely.’

‘I was planning to visit my parents,’ I explained. ‘It is the Easter weekend, after all.’

‘Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,’ he said, with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘Haven’t you learned anything from me in the last few months? Must you always run for cover to the safety of those silly bourgeois, Christian values that your family drummed into you from an early age? These Christian festivals are just a sham – a pale shadow of the real thing. You’re coming with me this weekend to discover what Easter is really about.’

‘Coming with you? Where?’

‘To Stonehenge, of course. We’ll drive down late on Saturday night. We have to be there before dawn – that’s when the ceremony will begin.’

He went on to explain, carefully, as if to an imbecile child, that the Christian story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ was in fact nothing more than a corruption of much older and more powerful myths concerning the rising of the sun following the vernal equinox. Even the word Easter and its German equivalent, Ostern, came from a common origin – Eostur or Ostar – which to the Norsemen meant the season of the rising sun, the season of new life. And so, at dawn on Sunday, hundreds of pagan worshippers would gather within the great circle of stones outside Salisbury to pay their homage to the Sun God.

‘And you and I, my dear Harold, will most certainly be among them. Come to my place on Saturday evening – we’ll have a little supper – and then some friends will pick us up in their car at about two. We should be there in plenty of time.’

‘Friends?’ I asked. ‘What friends?’

‘Oh, just some people I know,’ he said, enigmatically. Roger liked to keep the different areas of his life strictly compartmentalized, and if he was about to introduce me to some of his fellow pagans, I knew that I was expected to regard this as a special privilege.

‘Remember,’ he said, just before we parted, ‘the Sun God is the masculine God. That’s what we will be going there to worship – the spirit of Manhood, the essence of Maleness. I shall,’ he added (with a challenging gleam in his eye), ‘take it very amiss if you choose not to come.’

I told him that I would think about it, and left in a state of genuine indecision.

Writing all of this down, at almost thirty years’ distance, it seems incredible to me now that I should have been so in thrall to Roger Anstruther and his arrogant, domineering personality. But remember – whoever you are, reading these pages – that I was callow, I was unsure of myself, I was a young man alone in a big, frightening city, and in Roger I felt that I had met someone who – how shall I put this? – who confirmed something about myself. Something I had always suspected – always known, even, in the very remotest depths of my being – but which I had been too frightened (too cowardly, he would say) to acknowledge. I was still, at that tender age, hungry to unravel the mysteries of life. At first I had thought that the answers lay in poetry, but now Roger was beginning to open up a different, even more alluring world to me – a world of shadows, portents, symbols, riddles and coincidences. Was it coincidence, for example, that all our schemes seemed to be coming to fruition on the eve of the festival of the Rising Sun, when this was the very name of the pub where we’d had all our earliest and most significant conversations? Questions like this nagged at my youthful, impressionable mind and made me feel that perhaps I was now on the verge of some revelation, some momentous breakthrough which would resolve all difficulties and set me free from the bonds which I felt had been restraining me all my life.

It was for these reasons – reasons which might seem feeble and even frivolous to an unsympathetic reader (forgive me, Max, if that is you!) – that I chose not to return to my parents’ home that weekend; but on Saturday evening, instead, I set out on the long walk which led from my shared house in Highgate to Roger’s rented bedsitting room in a decrepit Notting Hill terrace.

When I arrived, he was sitting at his desk. I could see at once that something was wrong. His face was deathly pale, and his hands were trembling as he sat hunched over pages and pages of densely scribbled figures, to which he was adding further calculations in pencil, in a state of such ferocious concentration that he barely looked up to register my arrival.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ he answered curtly, and began whispering some more numbers under his breath, while scrawling ever more frantically on the paper.

‘Roger, you look dreadful,’ I persisted. ‘Is it … ?’ Of course, I knew what it was. I felt suddenly faint, and sat down heavily on his bed in the corner of the room. ‘Don’t tell me it’s the wager. Did it go wrong?’

‘Completely wrong,’ he said, in a trembling voice, crumpling up one of the sheets of paper, tossing it aside, and starting on a new one. ‘Utterly wrong.’

‘Well … What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Mean? What does it mean?’ He glared at me in fury. ‘It means that we’ve lost everything. It means that on Monday morning I have to give Crispin the lot.’

‘But – But you told me that wasn’t possible.’

‘It wasn’t possible. Or at least, it shouldn’t have been possible.’

‘How did it happen? Didn’t the right horses win?’

‘Almost, yes. But then one of the races ended in a dead heat. That threw the whole thing out. We hadn’t allowed for it.’

‘I thought you’d allowed for everything.’

‘Will you just be quiet for a minute, Harold?’ He seized the sheet of paper and waved it at me, by way of demonstration. ‘Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to make sense of it all.’