The Takeover by Muriel Spark
‘It started off,’ said Pauline, ‘with a mass.’
‘In church?’
‘No, no. It was an altar set up in this flat in the Via Giulia. I don’t know whose flat it was. Well, they had a mass, there was a Catholic priest with his vestments, and the congregation, about thirty people.’
‘What sort of people? Rich, poor, how did they strike you? All English-speaking? What language was the mass?’
‘It was in English, but there were lots of Italians and French, all sorts. All sorts of people and some nuns. Quite a lot of nuns in their habits; and later I found some were nuns and priests in ordinary clothes. They seemed all ages, really, but only one or two really old, and they were nuns.’
‘It is from ordinary people that the great revenues come,’ said Hubert. ‘They are filching the inheritance of the great Diana of Nemi, the mother of nature from time immemorial.’
‘I did talk about Diana, don’t worry,’ Pauline said. ‘A number of people were very interested. And do you know who was there? Those Jesuits, Cuthbert Plaice and his friend Gerard Harvey the nature-study man, were there. Father Gerard, in fact, was urging some of the young men to come to one of our meetings and telling everyone how wonderful Nemi was, how the environment comes right up to the back door and so on. Father Cuthbert was asking me a lot about your personal origins, Hubert, and I told him well, it was a long story. Then—’
‘Miss Thin,’ said Hubert, ‘I want the whole picture of this charismatic meeting and you can tell me afterwards what the Jesuits said. At the same time, my dear, I must say it was most commendable of you to get your word in about the true Fellowship. You’re wonderful, Miss Thin, you really are. Tell me about the mass.’
‘Well, the mass only preceded the meeting. It was an ordinary mass except for the swinging hymns, and the fact that the Kiss of Peace was real kisses, everyone kissed everyone. That sort of thing. The nuns seemed to like it and there was lots of embracing and singing.’
‘We should have nuns in the Fellowship,’ Hubert said. ‘Diana always had her vestal virgins. We should have vestal virgins watching a flame on the altar day and night.’
‘Well, they would have to be part-time,’ Pauline said. ‘Who is going to come and watch a flame all day?’
‘When we have a greater following,’ Hubert said, ‘all these things will fall into place. Did the Jesuits participate in this orgy?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say it was an orgy. The Jesuits were there as observers, anyway. The prayer meeting that followed the mass was more exciting, when they spoke with tongues and made emotional comments on the scriptures. They made a sound like an Eastern language, Hebrew, or Persian maybe, or Greek, I don’t know what; but that’s speaking with tongues. Then they prophesy. There was a woman there, about thirty-five, she prophesied a lot, and would you believe it, she was a doctor. She proclaimed a passage from the Gospels and closed her eyes and threw up her hands. Everyone said “Amen”. Then we sang and clapped hands in syncopation, and sort of danced—’
‘What passage from the Gospels?’ said Hubert.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something about St Paul in his travels.’
‘That is not the Gospels. It is probably the Acts of the Apostles. What was the text?’
‘Oh, I don’t remember. Something about the Lord. It was all so noisy, and everybody was excited, you know. It wasn’t so important what the words were, I think.’
‘It never is,’ Hubert said. ‘And what were the Jesuits doing?’
‘Well, they didn’t join in but they seemed to be enjoying it all. Their eyes were all over the place. Cuthbert Plaice saw me. He said “Hi, Pauline, how do you like it?” I said I liked it tremendously, and I really did as a matter of fact, but the feeling wore off afterwards, you know.’
‘We must step up our services in the Fellowship’ Hubert said, ‘that’s clear.’
It was a hazy hot afternoon towards the end of June. Beyond the ranges of the Alban hills you had to imagine the sea, for indeed it was there, far away, merging invisibly into the heat-blurred sky-line.
Pauline had been busy over the past ten days, putting such a massive amount of energy into the task she had undertaken that in fact she felt she would never again in the course of her life find it in her to repeat the effort, even although Hubert kept reminding her that this was only a preliminary little gathering to the one planned for the autumn.
At the end of ten days Pauline had arranged a fairly big gathering of Hubert’s faithful to be held in the large overgrown garden behind the house stretching to the dark, moist woods. She had announced the event as a ‘secret meeting’, totally avoiding any written messages. Pauline had spent many hours on the telephone and had travelled around in Hubert’s car to notify the Friends of Diana and to exhort attendance. The object of this meeting was to form a nucleus around which the future cells of the Fellowship were to collect.
Pauline had not been able to get much done with the garden, but she had cleared enough to put up an altar and a flowery canopy, and to prepare a covered marquee for the fruit juice and sandwiches.
‘What will we do if it rains?’ she had asked Hubert snappily on one of those frantic ten days of preparation.
‘It will not rain,’ thundered Hubert.
On the last day she had been to Rome to get her hair cut and set, and also to buy the remarkable outfit which she now, as the expected throng began to accumulate, triumphantly wore. Too late, Hubert had seen her and exclaimed, ‘You can’t wear that!’ This was a khaki cotton trouser-suit with metal-gold buttons on the coat and its four pockets; Pauline had tucked the trouser-legs into a pair of high canvas boots, so that the whole dress looked like a safari suit. The hunting effect was increased by a pale straw cocked hat which perched on her short curled hair.
‘What do you mean?’ Pauline said when Hubert, already waiting in his leafy bower, bedecked in his silver-green priestly vestments, had exclaimed ‘You can’t wear that!’
‘It’s entirely out of keeping, and irreverent. You look like the commandant of a concentration camp or something out of a London brothel.’
‘It signifies the hunt,’ Pauline said. ‘Diana is a huntress, isn’t she?’
‘She is always portrayed wearing a tunic,’ Hubert said, ‘and a quiver full of arrows.’ It was a hot day, and his vestments were heavy, which made him feel sicker than ever.
‘Well, I can’t wear a tunic,’ said Pauline, ‘I haven’t the figure.’
‘The figure!’ shouted Hubert from under his greenery and his robes. ‘The figure …,’ he shouted across the garden. ‘If you think your figure fits into that outfit, with your haunches like a buffalo’s—’
Pauline started to cry, pulling from her satchel-bag a large red handkerchief with white spots which it would seem was designed, even the handkerchief, to enrage Hubert. Pauline’s skinny boy-friend Walter came out of the house, and stopped in some astonishment at the scene. He had not seen Hubert before in his robes nor Pauline in her new outfit, although he had seen her cry at various times.
Hubert, who had taken some care to pose himself under the bower, was unwilling to disarrange the effect. He stood motionless with his arm raised to receive in benediction the people whom he could already hear arriving at the front of the house. Motionless as he was, he screamed in his heat and fury, ‘That woman has no sense of stage management. Tell her to go and remove those objectionable clothes. She’s supposed to be the chief of Diana’s vestals and she looks like Puss-in-Boots at the pantomime. Don’t forget I’ve had experience with the theatre, I’ve had a lot of success, and when I ran my play in Paris, Ce Soir Mon Frère, I took responsibility for all the costumes.’
Walter, unable to make sense of the quarrel, said to Pauline, ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I have to wear something to symbolize my authority in the Fellowship,’ Pauline wailed from behind her red handkerchief. ‘Otherwise I’ll just be taken for one of the rest. I know what I’m doing and I’ve worked m
‘Why don’t you take off the boots and the hat?’ said Walter against the background of more explosive sounds from Hubert at the other end of the garden. ‘You’ll be too hot in all that stuff. It looks fine, but—’
‘Here they come,’ said Pauline, as a group of people walked up the side-path, chattering, to reach the back of the house. ‘I’m on duty.’ She strode to the little gate that divided the pathway from the garden, threw it open and began to receive.
Some had come from enthusiasm, some from curiosity, and a few peasants and trade-workers of the district who had already been initiated into the cult had come because they liked the international and egalitarian atmosphere.
Pauline had put out benches in front of the throne under the leafy bower where Hubert stood. She scrutinized each person, greeting them with an aloof, red-eyed smile, as she waved them to their seats.
‘Why, Pauline,’ said Father Cuthbert, ‘you look very sporty.’ Pauline waved him on, while Walter, beside her, in his blue jeans and open-necked shirt, smiled nervously. The priest passed on, accompanied by his fellow-Jesuit Gerard Harvey.
One local woman whispered to another, ‘Those Jesuits always come, both of them.’
‘The Jesuits always go two together, never alone,’ said her friend.
‘Like carabinieri,’ said the other, ‘because one can read and the other can write,’ and her laughter crackled in the air like a fire in the grass until Pauline’s frown quenched it.
By four o’clock they were all assembled and the gate was locked. Pauline had confiscated a motion-picture camera from Letizia Bernardini who had brought her brother Pietro to take a film of the proceedings. Letizia looked sour but did not challenge the booted leader. Berto’s son Pino was also of the party, he having been especially attracted to this meeting because of Maggie’s feud with Hubert.
Not long ago, Letizia’s friend, the psychiatrist Marino Vesperelli, whom she had brought to dinner to meet Maggie that night at her father’s house two years before, had discovered in the big general mental hospital in Rome a Swedish patient who had no relations who bothered with him, no friends, but who was apparently cured of the drug addiction which had landed him in that place two summers ago. In conversation with the patient Marino learned that he had been at Nemi with Hubert, working, he said, as a secretarial aide; and in this way, with Letizia’s help, Kurt had been safely restored to Hubert who was horrified but impotent to protest; besides, Pauline had taken the boy’s part. Kurt was now an acolyte in the Fellowship. He got up late and went out often in a little cinque cento car that Letizia had lent him: Hubert prowled around Kurt’s room and searched his pockets while he lay asleep, hoping to find traces of narcotic drugs or a hypodermic needle, and so an excuse for getting rid of him. However, Kurt was so far blameless, only somewhat lazy, and here he was as part of the household to help with the meeting in the wild-grown leafy garden.
Pauline’s energies had brought back two other lost sheep, named Damian Runciwell and Ian Mackay, only a little changed in appearance and very happy to come and spend another summer with Hubert as in the idyllic past of 1972 when they had all lazed and lain around together, wearing fantastic jewellery and cooking fantastic food. Pauline had often heard Hubert talk nostalgically of those days before she had come to work for him, and before Maggie’s marriage had spoiled everything. Like a good sheep-dog Pauline had rounded up three of those four secretaries, and brought them happily before Hubert. Hubert had much to bear in these days of his new prosperity. ‘I would have brought you Lauro, too, if I could have done,’ Pauline assured him.
‘I’m sure you would,’ Hubert had said.
‘Well, all I want to do is to make you happy, Hubert,’ said Pauline.
‘It’s the thought that matters, Miss Thin,’ Hubert said. ‘Diana be praised.’
‘Oh, aren’t you glad to see these old friends? You know how you always talk about that summer before I came to help you out. Now you can relive it all over again. Except, of course, for Lauro. I’m sorry about Lauro. Only, you know, he’s absolutely over there on the Radcliffe side and making a fortune. And getting married, too.’
Hubert would have thrown Pauline out that very evening, the three young men with her, had it not been that she knew too much, she knew too much. And here they were among the crowd of selected followers in the garden.
Hubert smiled on them all benevolently when they were seated. About thirty people, he thought. Pauline Thin must be out of her mind, he thought, to call a secret meeting of thirty-odd people. What sort of secret is that?
He decided to change his plan somewhat, and to refrain from discussing anything that might be deemed illicit by the Italian or ecclesiastical authorities, such as the raising of funds and the missionary work necessary to internationalize the Fellowship. A service of worship and a testimony of faith might equally serve this purpose, together with a deliberate accent on the charismatic features of the old, old religion of nature.
‘I am the direct descendant of the goddess Diana,’ he announced, ‘Diana of Nemi, Diana of the Woods and so, indirectly, of her brother the god Apollo.’
Sitting apart from the congregation the two Jesuit observers gave out charismatic smiles in all directions and made way for a late arrival whom Pauline had sent to sit with them. Another observer, Hubert thought. How many observers do you have at a secret meeting? He glared at Pauline who looked angrily back, with fury on her face under her ridiculous hat. Evidently she was still dwelling on Hubert’s insults. As well she might, Hubert thought with desperate resentment of the woman as he looked at her, ordering people around, placing them here, guiding them there, with those boots on her awful legs. Hubert, under the leafy trellis, breathed deeply. He noticed that Pauline now held a black-bound book in the hand that indicated the seats; Hubert thought it looked like his Bible but then he put the thought aside, not seeing what she could possibly want to do with it. As she also held the confiscated camera at this moment, Hubert assumed she had also, probably quite needlessly, taken charge of someone’s book: bossy little nobody.
Walter, the weak fool, was beside her, holding a list and ticking off names. Who were all these people? Pauline had told Hubert from time to time of new people who could be trusted. But he had no idea they amounted to so many. Two American art historians, very cultured, very rich, Pauline had said. A girl from Rome, ‘my best friend there,’ Pauline had said. Then she had said on one occasion, ‘a girlfriend of my friend and she happens to be Michael Radcliffe’s mistress.’ Hubert had felt satisfaction at this. Yes, but how did they add up to so many? Hubert did not know most of these people who sat before him.
From the house stepped another robed figure. He was dressed in a toga-like garment which bunched and bundled about his tubby body. It was the lawyer Massimo de Vita; he had come to stand by Hubert’s throne and give a simultaneous translation for the benefit of the Italians present. ‘Friends,’ said Hubert, holding out his arms in benediction, while Massimo announced, ‘Amici’.
‘Friends,’ Hubert said. ‘Brothers and Sisters of Nature. As I have said, I am the descendant of Diana and Apollo, the gods of the old religion that goes back beyond the dawn of history, into the far and timeless regions of mythology where centuries and aeons do not count,’
Massimo de Vita kept even pace behind Hubert, who spoke slowly, somehow without his usual energetic conviction; he was still ruffled by Pauline Thin; she had put him off his stroke. ‘Diana,’ he went on, ‘Goddess of Wildlife, is older than man. She fought on the field of Troy and was humiliated by her jealous step-mother who, as it is written in Homer, took the quiver of arrows from Diana’s shoulders and whacked her with it. But such was the charisma of Diana, the virgin goddess, protectress of nature, that she took no revenge, but rather decided to come to
Meanwhile the sudden voice of a woman cried out the determined statement, ‘I’m going to testify.’ Hubert, startled, looked towards the voice, while the toga’d advocate, also surprised, instantly pulled himself together, and, believing this to be part of the show, since the voice was Pauline’s, continued his dutiful translation, ‘… adesso vengo testimoniare....’
‘What is this interruption?’ said Hubert, as everyone turned to look at Pauline.
‘Cos’è questo disturbo?’ translated Massimo into his loudspeaker, although his eyes looked desperately about him for some guidance. He got none whatsoever. He looked towards Pauline, seeing her for the first time that day in her strange sporty outfit and immediately presumed that this interruption was a prearranged affair: a sort of dialogue, all part of that sense of theatre Hubert had so often said was necessary for the success of the Fellowship.
‘Miss Thin,’ Hubert bellowed into his amplifier, ‘do you realize you are in Church in every important sense?’
Massimo continued translating.
Pauline bounded up to the leafy bower and stood beside Hubert, grabbing the loudspeaker. ‘I have a right to testify and prophesy,’ she proclaimed, ‘and I want to testify from the New Testament.’
Father Cuthbert jumped up and down in his seat while his companion, Gerard, smiled eagerly. The rest of the congregation stirred and asked of each other what was it all about, and then fell silent as Pauline’s voice boomed out, “The First Epistle to Timothy, Chapter I, verses 3 and 4: