New Seed For Old

by Simon Raven

  ‘– Here am I,’ said Fielding. ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘And how long are you staying?’

  A waiter brought in lemon pancakes, Tessa’s choice of pudding as caviar had been Fielding’s choice of hors d’oeuvre.

  ‘How long are you staying, Fielding Gray?’ repeated Maisie when the waiter had gone.

  ‘Till I’ve checked the arrangements for the publication of my new book. Then I’ll go to Broughton to write the second volume.’

  ‘I thought it was meant to be all in one volume,’ said Tessa in her husky voice.

  ‘I got slack,’ Fielding admitted. ‘And they said that the first half would do on its own. Certainly, the extracts printed in the press have gone down well – they made a definite stir in Australia. Anyway, now I’m going to write Part Two, which will be very different.’

  ‘Different how?’ said Tessa.

  ‘Part One was about the youth of the grandfather I admired and loved: his youth and exploits, and those of his relations. Part Two will be about his old age. And about what happened to his relations.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘The fear of death.’

  ‘And that is what you are going to write about in Broughton,’ said Tessa, ‘the fear of death?’

  ‘And about the philosophies of those few that did not fear it. My grandfather did not fear it. But I think he secretly feared the manner in which it might come.’

  ‘We all fear that,’ Maisie said. ‘Rosie had a good quotation in her English last term: “To cease upon the midnight with no pain” – if only we could all be sure of that.’

  ‘In what manner did death come to your grandfather?’ said Tessa.

  ‘Swiftly, I think. As a friend. As it turned out, he need not have feared. Others of whom I shall write were less fortunate.’

  ‘So you’ll be off at Broughton doing “skulls beneath the skin”,’ said Maisie, remembering another quotation from Rosie’s English, ‘and that’s the last of you gone for the rest of the summer.’

  Teresa looked at Fielding. Something should be done, he read in her look. I’m not going to do it, for I’m going to the Enchanted Castle, into which people like Auntie Maisie will not (thank God) be permitted to follow me. But something should be done. If you love me, if you love my love, do it.

  ‘Come to Broughton,’ said Fielding, resting his hand on Maisie’s arm. ‘A little sea air would do you good.’

  ‘But all these rubbishy tourists passing through the hotel… Who’s going to –’

  ‘– Mr Huxtable will manage very well without you. And there’s Miss Jackson will help him.’

  ‘Miss Jackson is a snooty and opinionated shrew.’

  ‘But very efficient, which is why you keep her. You are not indispensable, Maisie. Nobody ever is. And you can ring up every day to check on what’s passing. Broughton is not a million miles away should there be an emergency requiring your return. Come to Broughton Staithe, Maisie, and see that part of my life and my past which you have never seen. While I write, you can read. You have become very fond of reading, of following up what Tessa and Rosie are reading at School. There is a verandah, looking over the golf course towards the sand dunes and the ruined gun sites left over from the war. A scene unspoiled for the last forty years. So you shall sit on the verandah, and every now and then you can raise your eyes to the dunes and the wartime bunkers, and you can say to yourself, “That is where my friend, Fielding Gray, used to wander, when he was a green boy, sick for love.”

  Before Raisley Conyngham travelled down to Ullacote he had luncheon with Giles Glastonbury, who entertained him at the Savoy Hotel.

  ‘There’s much better fodder at any of my clubs,’ grumbled Glastonbury, ‘but it won’t do for people who know us to see us together…now that things are warming up.’

  ‘Will no one know us here in the Savoy, Giles?’

  ‘They’re all too important in here – or think they are – to bother with the likes of us. American Jews and oil men, business scum from Japan. They’re not interested in an ex-cavalryman and an usher. Oh yes, I know you own a string of horses, but they’re all in training for National Hunt, and this lot here wouldn’t be interested in anything that didn’t fetch a clean million as a yearling. In short, my boy, we’re two little blobs of nothing in this place, and that’s how we want it.’

  Raisley could imagine few men less like a blob of nothing than Glastonbury, who stood out among the runty clientele of the Savoy like an Admiral of the Fleet on the bridge of his flagship. When he said something of the kind, ‘But none of them knows or cares who I am,’ Glastonbury said. ‘If we’d gone to Brummel’s, half the chaps there would have said, “There’s that brute Glastonbury with that sly little sod, Conyngham, and by God, they look as if they’re plotting something.” The word would have gone round –’

  ‘– And then been instantly forgotten –’

  ‘– And then been remembered again, perhaps, when certain bits and pieces came floating in with the flood tide at the autumn equinox.’

  ‘Quite the poet today, Giles.’

  ‘Pulses, Conyngham. That’s what it’s all about. Rhythms and pulses. Call that poetry, if you like. Rhythms in the ocean tides: pulses in the blood of man and woman. For woman, read Theodosia Canteloupe. She’s had her fluids tested, whatever that may mean. They say she’s going to drop a girl when the time comes. Canteloupe told me two days ago.’

  ‘Is he disappointed?’

  ‘Oddly enough, no. He’s rather tickled. Chuffed, as the troops used to say; chuffed to buggery. He thinks that a girl by young Marius and out of Theodosia might be quite something. “The mistake I made over Sarum,” he said, “was to bring that old wretch Fielding Gray in on the job. Of course he sired a stumer. But that spunky young Marius… It could be a different tale with him getting up between my lady’s legs. Not just a girl, Glastonbury: a Princess.”

  ‘Then…as regards Sarum…we proceed according to our original intention?’

  ‘We do. That is to say, you do. Canteloupe takes the view that if once Tully Sarum were out of the running, a girl would certainly inherit the Barony after his own death and that would be enough for her to do the thing really well. Like a “Princess”, to quote his word again. He sees it all as a kind of fairy tale. Anyway, there was never much chance that that poor little beast Tully would get a reprieve, whatever happened. Even if Theodosia had been booked by the apothecary to bring forth nothing but a couple of wet farts, Canteloupe would still have wanted Tully out of the way, and who can blame him? No one wants the Fairy Fella’s by-blows cluttering up the senior nursery.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘I’ll set the thing in train. It’s simply a matter of presenting the facts in such a way that Marius can respond as we would wish in the first instance, and after that… “Now let it work”, as Mark Antony observes in the play.’

  ‘Surely things can go wrong in the working? Between Marius’ “response in the first instance” and the right true end?’

  ‘Things can always go wrong under the moon, Glastonbury. The advantage of this method is that if something does go wrong, no one will ever know of it. No one will even know that there was anything to go wrong, because events will have followed an entirely normal progression…as they will do if everything goes right.’

  ‘But in the former case, Sarum would still be there?’

  ‘Obviously. But no harm done. No alarums, no excursions, no suspicions. Nothing to stop another effort as soon as you wish.’

  ‘I see,’ said Glastonbury. ‘Very well, Raisley. Pull the switch.’

  Marius had a lovely time staying with Palairet’s Auntie Flo. He liked her; he was charmed and amused by her house, which, at high tide, was positively in the sea; he enjoyed the race meetings and cricket matches to which she took him (in a chauffeur-driven car, sometimes, which still left plenty of change out of one grand a week): he put in
some useful days of work for his postponed ‘O’ levels; and he was gratified by the delicious food and drink which, now that there were means to do it and an audience to appreciate it, she put on day after day with never a single dish repeated.

  For her part, Auntie Flo, while not exactly loving Marius, regarded him as something very precious, something fragile if not volatile, something wholly out of the ordinary – something to be tended and served, not quite worshipped but satisfied, placated and perhaps flattered (lest of his own will he should leave the precinct and seek another); something, furthermore, to be guarded and secured and protected, lest strange or greedy men should come to steal away such treasure.

  And then, one morning after Marius had been at Sandy Lodge nearly three weeks, Captain Jack Lamprey turned up. He was known to both Marius and Auntie Flo as Raisley Conyngham’s private trainer, and was remembered by Auntie Flo as a disreputable but not totally unendearing figure from ‘the old days’. Although, as being of Raisley’s household, he clearly came under Theodosia’s category of ‘Baddies’, he was, she remembered, like all Baddies, to be admitted without question, observed and reported on. Auntie Flo therefore admitted him not only without question but with considerable nostalgic pleasure (Sozzler Jack of Hamilton’s Horse), gave immediate assent when he proposed to take Marius out for a walk along the shore, and obeyed her orders from Theodosia by following them along the beach as far as she could with her bare eyes and then with her binoculars (Sozzler Jack had always liked girls, but you never quite knew these days), and carefully entered the time of their starting out and the pace of their progress in her Log-Book for Theodosia.

  ‘First of all, laddie,’ said Jack Lamprey to Marius as they walked on the hard sand just below the tideline, ‘love from everyone at Ullacote. Most of all from Jenny. But as we know, the Governor has his reasons for not wanting you there just now – perhaps not for a very long time – and that is simply that.’

  ‘Is Milo there?’

  ‘For a couple of nights, he was. Then he went off to some college at Cambridge.’

  ‘Lancaster?’

  ‘That’s it. Lancaster. Now, laddie,’ said Sozzler Jack, ‘it’s like this. I’m the messenger boy. I’ve got my message, and I’ve got it right. You can ask questions, but only if I don’t make the thing clear. There’s to be no probing, no speculation, no enquiries about ancillary matters. Right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Jack in his beautiful mellow voice, flowing over his solecisms, caressing his coarseness and making music of his obscenities, ‘Raisley says that Glastonbury says that Canteloupe says that Theodosia Canteloupe has had her jolly old juices checked and is going to throw a female. It’s not your fault, and Canteloupe is not displeased. He will settle for a girl, but when the popping’s stopped he’ll probably want you and Theodosia to try again for a boy.’

  ‘What about Sarum?’ Marius said.

  ‘Sarum is no part of my message. My message is that a good girl will be good enough, but a boy will be better, because a boy can be a Marquess and a girl can’t. A girl can only be a Baroness –’

  ‘– So what about Sarum? –’

  ‘– I told you at the start. No enquiries about ancillary matters. Where was I?’

  ‘A girl can only be a Baroness.’

  ‘Righty; but Canteloupe will happily settle for one, provided it’s got a handsome head, two shapely arms and legs, and its quim is in the right place. If it hasn’t got all those things, or if it’s just an ugly little mandrake, you and her ladyship go jig-a-jig all over again, hoping for better luck next time out.’

  ‘And even if it – if she – is perfect, he may require me…to lie with Lady Canteloupe once more, in hope of my begetting a boy?’

  ‘Pompous way of putting it, but you seem to have the point.’

  ‘End of message?’

  ‘Not quite, no.’

  ‘So there is something about Sarum?’

  ‘Fuck Sarum. That is to say, as I’ve already told you twice, no, there’s nothing about him. The rest is about your little chum, Tessa Malcolm.’

  ‘Oh? And where does she come into all this?’

  ‘You well may ask. She’s fallen for the Marchioness. The Marchioness has fallen for her. They’ve got a real pash going between them. Which could mean problems, if you think about it carefully, when it’s time for you to have it off again with Theodosia.’

  ‘And what does Theodosia think about it all?’ said Marius.

  ‘Nobody’s asked her. She’s happy for the time being with little Tessa – by the way, she always calls her “Teresa” – who stays with her twenty-four hours of every day. She doesn’t seem to be thinking of much else.’

  ‘The child?’ said Marius. ‘The child she’s carrying? She must be thinking of that.’

  ‘Apparently she’s behaving…as if she and Tessa are in some way bearing the child together. Tessa goes along with that.’

  Marius, tall for his age, halted and looked out over the Bristol Channel. Stumpy Jack, whom Marius topped by a head, lurked beside him. Eventually Marius said, ‘If Tessa can comfort my lady, can in some sense ease her burden by sharing it, then that must be to the good. But what will happen in September… when Tessa returns to School, as return she clearly must, and leaves Theodosia alone?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Jack. ‘But that comes under the heading of ancillary matters. No speculations allowed there. All I’m told to do is to warn you that Tessa and the Marchioness have got this crush on each other, and that this might make a difference after the child is born and you are required, as you may be, to go again and lie, as you have put it, with her ladyship. You’ve got to start thinking about how to manage it now. The idea is, you see, that since you’ve always been close to Tessa/Teresa and she to you, they might…let you come in with ’em once now and again…so you could get the trick done that way. Anyhow, you’re to start thinking about it now.’

  ‘But all that is months away, sir. What is to happen meanwhile?’

  ‘Raisley thought you might ask that, You really know the answer for yourself, he said, but if you did ask, I was to issue a reminder: do nothing at all off your own bat; just let whatever happens happen. The Governor was particularly strong on that: you’re to sit still, he says, and let the thing go on; if you’re needed to take a part, you’ll know it quick enough.’

  Jakki and Caroline Blessington walked in the woods near St Bertrand-de-Comminges (ilex and fagus) with Rosie Stern and little Oenone Guiscard.

  ‘When you are here,’ said Jakki to Rosie, ‘Oenone’s mother puts Oenone in your care so that she can give all her time to your own mother. Who takes care of Oenone when you’re not here?’

  ‘They all do, I think. Jo-Jo Guiscard, her husband, my mother. They take it in turns,’

  ‘They think Oenone is a nuisance,’ Oenone said. ‘They are not unkind, but they think she is a nuisance. Oenone is glad that Rosie has come.’

  ‘And Rosie is glad,’ Rosie said, ‘that Jakki and Caroline have come.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Caroline, ‘Daddy is driving us into the mountains. Want to come?’

  ‘Is there room?’ said Rosie politely.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy in the front,’ said Jakki, ‘us three with Oenone in the back. Couldn’t be nicer.’

  ‘Nicer, nicer, nicer,’ echoed Oenone as she ran on in front across a clearing.

  ‘How long is there,’ said Rosie, ‘before the archangel comes with his sword?’

  Jakki took a while to interpret this. Then she said: ‘We are here for six weeks. Daddy will have to go back to London, to attend to his work for Lady Canteloupe and Carmilla Salinger – in your father’s old publishing firm, Rosie – after three or four weeks. He will leave the car here with Mummy and us. So perhaps, when the time comes for us to drive home (we shall take it very easy), you can return with us?’

  ‘And Oenone,’ said Oenone, scampering back towards them.

  ‘I think,’ said Ros
ie carefully, ‘that Oenone must stay here. But that is weeks away,’ she said, gathering Oenone’s head to her belly as Oenone’s face crumpled. ‘We have no need to think of that. Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet,’ echoed Oenone, breaking away from Rosie, ‘not yet, not yet, not yet.’

  Milo Hedley walked with Provost Llewyllyn in the Provost’s Garden at Lancaster.

  ‘Why is it,’ said the Provost, ‘that no one will let me see my grandson, Sarum? He came here some years ago to be christened in the College Chapel. There was some fool of a Bishop, I remember, who would talk modern slop at the Font instead of the proper words. In the end I baptized the child myself. He shat himself, so I stripped him and dowsed him. Total immersion…’

  ‘I wish I’d been there, Provost,’ said Milo, meaning it.

  ‘But no one has brought him here since,’ Sir Thomas went on, ‘and no one has invited me to go down into Wiltshire to see him. My own daughter’s son. And now my daughter is dead, and I am lonely –’

  ‘– Len is here with you,’ said Milo. ‘I am here.’

  ‘Why do the others not come? Carmilla, Piero, Nicos, Ivor Winstanley and Greco Barraclough.’

  ‘They are all away for the long vacation,’ said Milo, lying, knowing that they did not come because of their distaste and even loathing for himself.

  ‘Jeremy Morrison?’ whimpered the Provost.

  ‘He is in Australia.’

  ‘Fielding? Fielding Gray? Ah, but of course he went to Australia with Jeremy.’

  Milo let this assertion stand. It was, after all, true as far as it went.

  ‘But at least,’ whinged the Provost, ‘they should let me see my grandson. Sarum. Tullius. Sarum of Old Sarum. I christened him myself, you know.’

  ‘I know, Provost.’

  Milo settled the old gentleman on a bench. The Provost pointed happily to a name carved on the crossbar of its back:

  JEREMY MORRISON

  Placed here by his father, Luffham of Whereham