by Simon Raven
‘So,’ said Raisley Conyngham, as they turned at the Chapel end of the Terrace and began the countermarch, ‘one senses, Milo, that “Len” will be to your taste. Who,’ he said to Marius, ‘was the second personality of your visit?’
‘An Italian undergraduate called Piero Caspar. I knew him by repute,’ said Marius, ‘even before I met him. He was secretary to Ptolemaeos Tunne, who is the uncle of a girl called Jo-Jo Pelham, who married a Frenchman called Guiscard but then became attached to my mother.’
‘Ah,’ said Raisley Conyngham, in benign acceptance of all this.
‘Ptolemaeos is now dead. Caspar has inherited much of his money and the College most of the rest. Caspar is in his third year at Lancaster, and Len says they hope to make him a Fellow. In fact, “We shall make him a Fellow,” Len said, after Caspar had gone and he was taking me to the Main Gate to get a taxi.’
‘Very civil of him. But how did you come to meet this Caspar in the first place? What was he doing in the Provost’s Lodging?’
‘He’d been with the Provost, singing a Sicilian song to him. After which he came downstairs from the Provost’s bedroom to report to Len about what effect it had had. Apparently it wasn’t really a Sicilian song because Caspar had made it up. Mind you, Caspar isn’t Caspar’s real name, but only the name by which Ptolemaeos Tunne adopted him after he escaped from a monastery near Venice.’
‘I apprehend,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘that all that will bear a little investigation. Meanwhile, Marius, did you gather what the song was about?’
‘About tree nymphs. How they are resigned to die when their trees die.’
‘I see,’ said Raisley Conyngham. ‘All this because Sir Thomas is still obsessed by the dead elms of Lancaster. It sounds as if they’ll be the end of him. I think,’ he said to Milo, ‘that a study of Len and Piero Caspar – to say nothing of what’s left of the Provost – might pass an interesting month this summer.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Milo said.
‘I thought you thought it was such a good idea,’ said Marius.
‘I’ve had second thoughts.’ Milo looked at Raisley Conyngham in a challenging manner. ‘I’m leaving here at the end of this quarter,’ he said. ‘I’m going to a new world. I must decide for myself on the best manner of my entering it. I’m not sure, after all, that Lancaster in the long vacation is the best way.’
Marius looked carefully at Conyngham, to see how he was reacting to this disobedience. Raisley’s face had simply gone blank. At first Marius thought: He can’t cope. Milo is grown too big for him. But when Raisley Conyngham said, ‘Suit yourself, Milo; I think that they’d be just as glad to have Marius as you,’ Marius saw that Milo was sagging all down his body like a ripped garbage bag. Milo thought he was a big boy at long last, Marius conjectured. He wanted to go and stay at Lancaster, he wanted to have his way and go there, as if by his own decision. He was therefore annoyed with Mr Conyngham for contradicting him at the beginning of the discussion and for simply taking him for granted at the end of it. Milo, in a word, was in a pet, and was now about to be put in his place. And quite right too, Marius thought. When it comes to the marrow of the thing, Milo couldn’t do without Mr Conyngham any more than I could. Mr Conyngham…is creating us.
‘I only meant,’ said Milo, trying to save face, ‘that the matter should be fully discussed before any decisions are made.’
‘It has been,’ said Raisley, ‘and they have been. After due cogitation, it has been decided that you should go to the Provost’s Lodging this summer – if he is still alive and if you are called for.’
‘And what will Marius do this summer?’ said Milo, still blustering slightly.
Raisley dowsed the last sparks of rebellion by taking up Milo’s question but utterly ignoring Milo.
‘Your mother won’t want you in France?’ said Raisley to Marius.
‘I think not. Can I come to Ullacote?’
‘No,’ said Raisley. ‘You and Jenny would seek each other out. You understand that I can’t have that. Any attempt, on the part of either of you, to renew the magic which I made for you at Bellhampton would destroy it utterly now. But do not look so sad, little Marius the Egyptian. There will be something…to help you pass the long, hot summer. I promise you that.’
In the repaired romanesque chancel, under the ramparts of St Bertrand-de-Comminges, Isobel Stern lay in bed with Jo-Jo Guiscard, both panting slightly, having taken their fill of honey-sweet love.
‘Thank God Rosie’s gone,’ said Isobel at last.
‘But she’s a dear girl. And so sweet with Oenone.’
‘So intense,’ Isobel said. ‘Those great black eyes, under that huge expanse of white marble forehead, under those masses of raven hair. So different from Marius. I wish Marius didn’t dislike me so much these days. When he was younger…we were almost lovers in a way.’
‘I’ve always said that sons would make the best lovers. It’s not too late for you and Marius,’ Jo-Jo said, ‘only he don’t like your infernal meanness about money. Nor I don’t, neither. We’ve all got plenty, one way and the other. Let’s make the most of it.’
‘In a world so full of misery –’ Isobel began her habitual sermon.
‘– There’s no cause to add one’s own to it,’ Jo-Jo interrupted with her habitual confutation. ‘If you want to do something about the misery, then give some of your money away in good causes. But you don’t do that. You just moan about the guilt of having it and lock it up tighter and tighter. Oenone will be sad,’ she said, firmly changing the subject, as she knew by now that Isobel’s stinginess was pathological, like that of the great Dickensian misers, and there was no longer any point in attempting rational discussion of it, ‘now that Rosie’s gone.’
‘I shall care for her,’ said Isobel, ‘and so will her father.’
‘So shall not I,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Now, if she’d been my son, it might have been a very different matter. But as it is, we’re best apart, Oenone and I. The way she looks at me, she thinks I’m a rather nasty joke. Come to that, I think pretty much the same of her.’
‘She’s clever,’ said Isobel. ‘Soon she must begin to be educated. We must find the right school. I suppose Jean-Marie will know about the French ones?’
‘An English one, I think, darling,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘Get her nicely out of the way for three months at a time.’
‘Leave aside,’ said Isobel, ‘that English boarding schools cost intolerable sums of money and are repulsive instances of privilege, you must realize that these days you cannot get your child out of the way, not in any of ’em, not for anything near three months – not any more. Three weeks, if you’re lucky. They now have fortnightly exeats, special parents’ weekends, and a half-term holiday as long as the Boat Race. The whole thing’s a nightmare, to judge from Marius’ prep school.’
‘Can’t you just pay the school to keep them,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘during all those exeats and things? That’s what boarding schools are for – to stop them from being a nuisance.’
‘They don’t quite see it like that any more. The last school I knew of,’ said Isobel, ‘that provided the sort of Squeersian service you seem to be after, was where poor Baby was sent in 1973. To be strictly fair, it was jolly good in its way. Work, games, discipline – all top-hole, as the headmistress, Miss Wentworth Rex, would have said. And the children were hardly let out at all. Baby adored it – she was at a very competitive stage. And we all know how Baby wound up.’
‘I’ll tell you a thing,’ said Jo-Jo, full of loyalty to her dead friend and spite toward the living one, ‘Baby was fifty times as exciting as you. You are like an animated statue lying on top of one, a kind of female missionary, if you take my meaning, durable and serviceable, indeed, but without a hint of invention or variation. Baby was like a soft and sensitive snake, coiling and licking and flicking all round one’s body. What was that school called? The one she went to in ’73?’
‘Radigund’s,’ said Isobel huffily, ‘after the Quee
n of the Amazons.’
‘Does it still exist?’
‘No doubt. It was very well found for what it was. When Baby left it, she could quote you half the Iliad – in Greek.’
‘I wonder she never went on to Oxford or Cambridge.’
‘Too keen to marry Canteloupe. And bored stiff, I should think, with learning all that Greek poetry by rote.’
‘If you don’t get poetry by heart at that age,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘you never will. I wish I had. That’s one thing I can give Oenone – a proper education, with a store of poetry she’s learned by heart.’
‘By rote.’
‘It’s what he’d learned by rote at school that kept Robert Kee sane for four years in a prisoner-of-war camp. He wrote it all out and studied it afresh, like a text. I want Oenone to be like that. Not only must she have Greek, but she must have the other things Kee had – discipline and rule. Rule is the basis of all intellectual achievement – and of all Art.’
‘Aren’t you leaving people out?’ sniffed Isobel. ‘People are more important, you know, than Intellect or Art.’
‘Without Intellect and Art they are hardly people. Certainly not people worth any sort of consideration. Art is the only thing that keeps us human,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘If Radigund’s, as well as keeping Oenone out of the way, can teach her the Rule that underlies Art,’ she said, ‘then Oenone will have had the finest gift of all, and I shall no longer feel guilty and squalid, like a pair of wet knickers, whenever I look at her. I shall ring up Radigund’s tomorrow. Uncle Ptolemaeos,’ she carrolled, ‘will find me the address and the number. Perhaps he’ll fix it all for me.’
‘Oenone is not yet three, darling. And Ptolemaeos is dead.’
‘So he is.’ She rested her head on Isobel’s long breasts. ‘A statue,’ she said, ‘but a lovely statue: warm marble. Well, we can soon find out about Radigund’s,’ she giggled, ‘and book Oenone in against she’s old enough, through “Young” John Groves, the lawyer.’
‘Of course,’ said the headmaster, Percy de la Poeur Chevenix, as they took their seats on the boundary of Green, ‘we make a good deal less of this than you did in your time, I dare say.’
Canteloupe and Giles Glastonbury had come to Canteloupe’s old School near Farncombe to watch the First XI play I Zingari. Later in the afternoon, Glastonbury was to introduce Canteloupe to Raisley Conyngham, a rendezvous having been arranged for the tea interval. But meanwhile the plan for the first part of the afternoon had been badly upset: the headmaster, who had not been told (why should he be?) that Canteloupe was coming, nevertheless spotted him and recognized him, from one of his photographs in the press, soon after his arrival, and insisted on giving him, as a prominent Old Boy, a personally guided tour of all the recent additions to the School – the Ceramists’ Centre (bulging jugs), the Summerskill Library (pamphlets about welfare benefits, venereal diseases and the wickedness of manly diversions), the 2000 Careers’ Bureau (advice on how to enter the ‘creative’ and ‘caring’ professions), and the Medical and Psychiatric Complex, which was, as Glastonbury had proclaimed in a moment of mutiny, a malingerers’ paradise, with huge posters advertising all the illnesses you could claim to be suffering from if you were too stupid to think of any for yourself.
‘It is important that the young should be clinically aware,’ intoned the headmaster, ‘of every aspect of forensic or domestic medication.’
At this juncture, while tottering out towards the next edifying exhibit, Canteloupe and Glastonbury had been rescued by a very old, stylish and voluminous gentleman, who was demanding and not getting a Beecham’s powder, this sort of thing being too unsophisticated to be comprised in forensic or domestic medication.
‘Ah, Detterling,’ said the voluminous old gentleman (voluminous in the full sense, meaning both loose and ample). ‘The only boy that ever made a double century in a School Match.’
‘Good afternoon, Senior Usher,’ said Canteloupe, as if addressing the Queen Mother in male drag. ‘This is my friend, Giles Glastonbury,’ and then to Glastonbury, ‘the Senior Usher of the School.’
The headmaster’s face twisted with distaste while this introduction went on.
‘I was the last of the Senior Ushers,’ explained the Senior Usher to Glastonbury, ‘so they let me keep the title when I retired a generation ago. They also let me hang around the place and make myself useful. Occasional lectures, that kind of thing.’ And then, to a white-coated attendant, ‘No, I need neither “upping” nor “downing”: simply a Beecham’s powder for a mild headache.’
The attendant produced an enormous octagonal pill which the Senior Usher waved away.
‘Time to be getting on,’ said the headmaster, ‘to the Personal Relations Laboratory.’
‘Detterling don’t want that rubbish,’ said the Senior Usher, ‘he wants the cricket. Right, Detterling?’
‘Right,’ said Canteloupe.
So to the cricket they had gone at last, the headmaster still in rather spiky attendance on Canteloupe, and the Senior Usher recalling ball by ball, for Giles’ benefit, Canteloupe’s celebrated double century of nearly half a century before. And then, as they sat down on a bench just under the Terrace, ‘Of course,’ said the headmaster, ‘we make a good deal less of this than you did in your time, I dare say.’
‘Do you indeed, headmaster?’ Canteloupe said. ‘No doubt you have so many things more worth the doing.’
‘We rather think we do,’ simpered La Poeur Chevenix. ‘Such as?’
‘All the arts and activities which I have just been showing you.’
‘To say nothing of the Personal Relations Laboratory, which we missed. We also missed the Armoury, I think?’
‘We no longer have one. There is a hut where those that wish may fire airguns under the supervision of a visiting corporal, who comes over from Aldershot once a fortnight.’ The headmaster rose with an air of having scored. ‘You’ll excuse me, Canteloupe,’ he said, in a Kentish-urban whine. ‘I’m due at the Precinct of Drama to attend a rehearsal of Edward Bond’s new masterpiece.’
‘It may surprise you to know,’ said the Senior Usher, as the headmaster lurched self-importantly away, picking at his fingernails, ‘that he’s a genuine La Poeur Chevenix. He puts the accent on, you know.’
‘What would one have found,’ enquired Glastonbury, ‘at the Personal Relations Library?’
‘At the moment they’re very keen, I believe, on what they call “odour compatibility”,’ said the Senior Usher. ‘Two people go into a small enclosed space together and fart. If they like, or can at least tolerate, the smell of each other’s farts, then a “Life Union” is pronounced feasible, if not obligatory. That kind of thing.’
‘I wonder the old place keeps going at all,’ said Canteloupe. ‘But this lot seem quite sharp in the field… Good man,’ he called as the bowler caught a hissing return to his wide left hand from I Zingari’s No. 4.
‘It’s quite simple,’ said the Senior Usher. ‘All those flops, weeds and wrecks who made a grizzling nuisance of themselves in your day and mine now go and suppurate together in those new centres or complexes or whatever. This leaves the decent fellows free to get on without disruption or interference. So you see, all this new nonsense has paid off because it gets the junk out of the way. Though I don’t think La Poeur Chevenix would put it quite like that.’
‘He didn’t seem enchanted with you.’
‘But he’s stuck with me. I have a special redundancy contract, arranged and subsidized by grateful Old Boys, with the assistance of the then headmaster, in 1955. I don’t go,’ gloated the old man, ‘till they carry me out in my box.’
‘Yes,’ said Canteloupe sourly, ‘I remember the subscription list coming round.’
‘I won’t ask you what you subscribed. Do you ever see Fielding Gray these days? I found out, on the q.t., that he put up rather a lot.’
‘Fielding was always extravagant. If you won’t think me impertinent, sir,’ Canteloupe said, ‘we always had the impressio
n…that you had extensive private means. Where, then, was the necessity of the subscription?’
‘My dear boy, there was no necessity, it was an act of homage. I was the last Senior Usher. The abolition of this ancient and honourable office could not pass without proper remark, of which I was the beneficiary.’
‘Why on earth,’ said Glastonbury, ‘was the post abolished?’
‘Because as long as there was a “Senior Usher”, all the rest of the staff were obviously also “ushers” – and they didn’t care for the title. Sounded too like an upper servant…which historically, of course, is exactly what schoolmasters are: upper servants to the nobility and gentry. Why try to disguise the fact?’
The players drifted off the field.
‘Come and have tea,’ said the Senior Usher; ‘we can have it with the players.’
Just for a moment, as he thought of the pavilion with its names and yellow photographs and smell of linseed oil, Canteloupe’s nostrils twitched with longing. Glastonbury gave him a good sharp nudge.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Canteloupe to the Senior Usher. ‘We’re due elsewhere.’
‘Elsewhere’ was the chapel, where they were to meet Raisley Conyngham at four-thirty in the Narthex, ‘a cool and passably elegant venue,’ as Raisley had observed to Glastonbury on the telephone.
With Raisley was Milo Hedley. When he saw the eyes of both Canteloupe and Glastonbury flicker with annoyance, Raisley said, ‘You must not mind his presence. Milo Hedley is my memory. And my lieutenant. Milo, this is Lord Canteloupe, of whom you will have heard, and his friend Major Glastonbury, whom you have already met at Ullacote.’
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ Milo said.
As he came forward to shake hands, he revealed the 1939-45 Memorial Screen, which until now he had been masking. And then, ‘What have we here?’ said Canteloupe, making towards the screen and inspecting the triple ranks of the dead. ‘“Connaught la Poeur Beresford, the Irish Guards.” Killed at Anzio, or was it Salerno? But let us bate that question, as this memorial poses others of greater moment.
