Even though this book has already generated a
lot of material, there are still a few more connections to be made, a few more
ideas to be explored and a few more familiar scenarios to be described.
Esmé Scarron: energy vampire
It is not just Scarron’s victims who become cold,
pale, tired and drained.
Stella Gibbons tells us that Scarron becomes
cold and pale after expending energy cursing the group of young soldiers who
made fun of him. Just like Helen Penclosa in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Parasite, he has temporarily used up all his resources.
He soon recovers and returns to normal after
holding Meg’s hand for a short time.
He has to live off other people: no wonder he
cannot bear to be alone; no wonder he fills his house with ‘friends’ and
followers. Perhaps the extra work this involves is why his subordinates always look
sulky!
Providential interventions
The above reference to Conan Doyle’s story
has reminded me of another connection:
The anonymous traveller who delays Esmé
Scarron reminds me of the talkative vicar in The Parasite who makes Agatha late
for her meeting with Austin Gilroy.
She thought that the vicar would never go, but
he is her unwitting saviour: by preventing her from going to Gilroy, he saves
her from having acid thrown over her. His intervention was providential.
Suspicious oversights
Energy vampires, witches and black magic
practitioners can affect what the people around them see, hear, feel, think,
say, do and understand.
As already described, Meg Lambert
misunderstands what she sees and hears, and puts a good construction on
Scarron’s bad behaviour. She also avoids telling her mother about the
waves of pity and sorrow that she is being bombarded with, on the conscious
pretext that she does not want to hear him criticised.
When the owner of the guesthouse/language
school tells her about the terrible revenge Scarron took on her husband for
bursting out laughing at him, Meg is sure that the story must be an
exaggeration or a mistake.
It is true that she is handicapped by her
upbringing: she has been protected from any knowledge of evil so she simply
could not believe that someone would deliberately do such a thing.
However, she has the feeling that she had
heard something like that before. The memory is lurking somewhere deep down
inside her and she is unable to bring it to the surface.
Of course it is normal and natural for people
to make wrong decisions and to not make connections they could have made, but
in Meg’s case I think that something sinister was at work.
Scarron benefitted in both cases: if Meg had
told her mother, Mrs Lambert might have decided to forbid Meg to ever see
Scarron again or even taken her straight home; if Meg had made the connection
between what had happened to her hostess’s husband and the young soldier and
realised that two people who had laughed at Scarron had suffered for it, she
might have avoided him from then on.
Thinking about that incident with the group
of young soldiers makes me wonder why only one of them became ill. Perhaps at
the time Scarron had only enough power to affect one person.
Esmé Scarron: sinister subhuman puppet?
It is interesting that it is just Meg who
cannot see what Esmé Scarron is.
Meg’s mother feels angry and frightened in
his presence. She thinks that he, his friends, his servants and his house are
sinister.
She gets the impression that he is only a
puppet, going through the motions that animate human beings, and she sees his
rich Italian guests the same way. Their
common interests give them a common expression - and we can deduce that this is
not a very pleasant one.
Meg’s mother just has her feelings and
intuition to warn her against Scarron. Those of us who know even a little about
such people will pick up indications of what he is from information we are
given.
For example, we are told that on occasion
Scarron’s voice becomes chilly, thin and clear like glacier water. Perhaps
something sinister is speaking through him.
Meg herself when she comes to her senses sees
Scarron as a man who behaves like someone who lives in a foreign country and copies
the habits of the best sort of its inhabitants because he believes that this
will get him what he wants there. He pretends to be a good person; he imitates
kindness.
It is not very realistic for a girl who is not
yet 19 to have such ideas, but they are spot on. Some people may not be
altogether human; they may not belong in this world; they are very different on
the inside from ordinary people. Not all are malevolent through!
The young engineer Humphrey feels such an immediate
and strong dislike for Scarron when he first meets him that he doesn’t want to
see or talk to him ever again. He has good instincts.
After he has secured Meg for himself,
Humphrey is afraid that Scarron will take revenge for being cheated out of his
prey. He has strange suspicions that it will be nothing so ordinary as lying in
wait and stabbing him or Meg. Once again, the source may not be realistic but
the idea itself is spot on.
We are told that Scarron goes without sleep
almost indefinitely; that is guaranteed to lower anyone’s resistance to evil forces and psychic joy-riders. It is asking for trouble. No wonder his
ideas about what he needs to fill the void inside are completely wrong.
Esmé Scarron and the wrong solution
The deeper he goes into his studies, the more
and more conscious Scarron becomes that something is missing in his life.
He looks in the wrong place for a solution.
Becoming more and more weary of standing
alone, he thinks that trying a new way of life with a new person will help him.
He hopes that Meg Lambert will fill the emptiness in his life. He thinks that
contact with her fresh young mind will benefit him.
He even asks Meg what she thinks that he
needs. She suggests conventional religion; a book about energy vampires and a
severe warning about how people like him usually end up would be much more
useful!
The next, and almost certainly final, article
will include some ideas about what Esmé Scarron could have done to improve his
life. Some of the fictional witches who have been featured in previous articles might
have been positive role models!
