The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,1

and for a while they were interested, until they realised how much trouble it might bring them. When she was found dead from a drug overdose in her flat a few weeks later some people suspected foul play, though most figured it was suicide. Vita, whose real name was David Fenwick, had a history of mental illness and had been seeing a psychiatrist as part of her gender reassignment process. An inquest delivered an open verdict.

What she stole from Sir Marius Trevelyan was never recovered by the authorities. Vita had given it to a friend of hers, a performance artist who went by the name of Pirate Jenny. Jenny herself went missing soon afterwards and is still officially a missing person. Whatever happened to her is the real mystery. But I know that the document was passed on to Danny Osiris, a British singer living in LA, because ten years later he gave it to me.

Those are the facts, but even here we’re dealing with uncertainties, improbabilities. Looking back, I find all kinds of other obscure data that connect me with Marius Trevelyan’s story: no clear linear narrative, merely quanta of information, free particles that fire off each other. Wonderful stuff, with cults and charismatic rocket scientists, and an unlikely conspiracy known as Operation Mistletoe. It’s like something out of Amazing Stories magazine, with tales that split and converge. A whole arcana of speculation, playing cards that can be used for games of chance or sleight of hand, even for divination.

Yes, those of a psychic inclination are liable to look for what they call a ‘reading’, but you have to be careful when you look for meanings. I’ve tried to keep a clear head when it comes to theories and conspiracies, because I saw my first wife go crazy with them. I’ve tried to accept that my life, like any other, has no special face value, that it could be played high or low. And that I was less of a joker, more of a fool, stepping out into the abyss. Come to think of it this is a useful image to start with. This is what the world was like when all this began in 1941. As I’ve said, it was a crucial point in the war and perhaps this moment in history is the one thing that connects everything. Time and space, seventy years ago, when the whole world was on the edge.

Yet when I think of southern California back in the early spring of that year, I see it as a kind of paradise. The land around the coast was so empty then. We would drive out to the point at Palo Verdes, park above the cliffs and climb down to deserted beaches. An uninhabited planet we could colonise with our dreams. I remember the thump and hiss of the breaking surf, the sun going down over the Pacific, as we gathered driftwood to build huge bonfires that would snap and crackle and spit great sparks up into the night.

I tend to idealise this part of my life and think of it as a time when I was still innocent. But innocent is such a big solemn word. Dumb would be more to the point. I knew nothing about the world. In fact for most of the time I was looking away from it, gazing out into the universe with a naive sense of wonder. I was a shy and awkward young man who still lived with his mother, struggling to become some sort of writer. A self-confessed fantasist. Oh, I was a fool all right. And my memories of that time become fractured, unstable. Yes, it was a time of uncertainty. Nuclear fission had just been discovered. But there was also a cataclysmic split in the unsteady matter of my self. It was, after all, the year I first had my heart broken.

I’d had a bad case of mumps as a child and all through my teenage years I’d had trouble with my sense of balance. At first I was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear. It seemed that there was a dysfunction in the vestibular system, the bony maze of passages that regulate and guide our sense of motion. But when no physical evidence of this could be detected, it was suggested that my problem might be psychological. In extreme stress I could experience panic attacks and heart palpitations. These could be symptoms of labyrinthitis, or perhaps the manifestation of an emotional